I had a teacher once suggest that we love people because of what we find in ourselves when we are with them and we hate people because of what we find in ourselves when we are with them.

I have been chewing on, digesting, and assimilating this for several years. I expand this teaching, not just to people but to everything…

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Hello Beautiful Humans,

In this monthly touch in you’ll find:

• On Being Nature“al”

• Poem of the Month: SOMETIMES by Mary Oliver

• Wild Woman Circle Dissolving & Amanda Roeben’s Offerings

• Astrology Readings & Moon Maps with Erin Lindsey

• Berkeley Connections Anyone?? and Locke Experiment Update

On Being Nature“al”

We seem to be in another explosion of the natural versus the artificial. What does it mean to be natural? What does it mean to be organic? What does it mean to be human?

I feel my mind at the center of a web of threads woven around the topic of being Nature, being Natural. I could go 100 directions with this topic. Let’s see where we end up today.

What comes to your mind when you hear this?

Take three deep breaths with me.

Walk a spiral staircase from your mind into a safe cavern deep in your womb or pelvic bowl. Imagine a gentle light source with you.

Be still.

Breathe. Deep, long inhale. Deep, long exhale.

Allow your self to slow down. What do you notice in your body? In your breath? In your emotions? In your knowing?

What does it mean to be nature? Can you feel the nature of your Being?

No worries if you can’t access any of that information. That’s all these little experiments are meant for . . . to give you more information about your self.

Your body is made up of earth, water, light, stardust, and animated by breath/mystery.

You are nature.

When was the last time you sat in contemplation of your nature and being part of nature rather than moving through the world as something other than nature?

We are nature.

My invitation to you this month is simple.

1. Upon waking, before doing anything else, go outside barefoot and spend five minutes breathing deeply with a gratitude for and an openness to the support of the sun and the earth. Allow your natural self to commune with the nature that supports your life on this planet.

2. In the evening, if you are able, spend five minutes with the setting sun in a similar contemplation and communion with the elements that support the elements of your natural being.

May you experientially know that you are held and nourished by Earth, breathed by Breath, energized by Sun, cleansed and flowing with Water and danced by the Stars. It will truly change you when your nervous system (not just your belief system) finally experientially knows you are loved, held and supported by Something bigger than you. Let that Something bigger be the tangible, physical expressions of Divine Presence through/as the Elements that your body, as home, is derived from.

emie

Poem of the Month: SOMETIMES by Mary Oliver

1

Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2

Sometimes
melancholy leaves me breathless.

3

Later I was in a field full of sunflowers.
I was feeling the heat of midsummer.
I was thinking of the sweet, electric
drowse of creation,

when it began to break.

In the west, clouds gathered.
Thunderheads.
In an hour the sky was filled with them.

In an hour the sky was filled
with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.
Followed by the deep bells of thunder.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lightning brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

5

Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

6

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again -
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably -
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7

Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

Wild Woman Initiation Circle Dissolving: Discover Amanada Roeben’s Offerings

Erin Lindsey and I have co-led SEVEN nine month Wild Woman Initiation and Continuing Circles over the last four years. We have taught women to slow down, drop in, access their true womb centered fuck yes and fuck no. We have followed the feminine map of the goddess Inanna and her cycle of descent into the underworld to meet her dark sister, Ereshkigal, to claim her wholeness and return to her throne in the heavens as Queen of Heaven and Earth.

Inanna is the first recorded story of a deity with a death and resurrection template. Her story dates back to 1900-1600 BCE. She dies on a hook, is dead for three days and resurrects to ascend to her throne in heaven. Sound familiar? Except she doesn’t die to save humanity. She dies to reclaim her Wholeness, meeting and accepting her dark and embracing her light.

Erin and I are moving into new stages of our lives and it’s time to dissolve this incredible experiment we have led to make room for the next iteration of our partnership and soulful creations. Thank you to all of you who have journeyed with us. We have landed in our Truth, Sovereignty and Soulful Self in greater ways because of our time together. May you tune into the magical roots of our sisterhood and Re-member your Wholeness whenever you feel broken.

AMANDA ROEBEN

If your heart was set on joining our circle this fall, I want to introduce you to Amanda Roeben’s offerings. She is an incredible Wild Woman in Visalia who I highly recommend working with either in circle, in her one on one offerings, or in other offerings she provides. Please check out her Circle and Upcoming Retreat HERE. Sign up for her newsletter HERE. Or read more about her from my past healer highlight HERE. Or follow her on IG HERE.

Astrology Readings & Moon Maps with Erin Lindsey

Erin Lindsey is an extraordinary astrologist. She is back at doing readings for individuals. Having my birth chart read and yearly solar return charts to keep coming back to has helped me feel sane in this chaotic world and helps me navigate the stormy waters of my life through my soulful evolution.

Connect with Erin to book a reading or to get more info HERE.

Erin is also providing free moon map readings twice a month with the full and new moon. These are gorgeous 20 min videos giving you information around the themes of the new and full moons of the month. To follow these videos you can connect with her on YouTube HERE or join us in The Cauldron & The Feast where she posts her videos twice a month HERE.

Berkeley Connections Anyone??? & Locke Experiment Update

Ash, my 21 year old, is moving to Berkeley this fall. Woohooo!!

Ash is applying for a massage therapy jobs in Berkeley and will be looking for a place to live soon. Ash’s partner and another friend will be attending Berkeley so they will be looking for accomodations within that proximity.

If you have any connections in the area to rent a room, we would love any leads you might have. The room is just for Ash. Their partner and friend both have dorm accommodations.

Feel free to text me at 559-372-9021 or email me at emie@findbalancedliving.com if you have any leads.

Thank you!

My little Locke Experiment had a wonderful summer in nature, quality time with each other and quality time with dear friends.

Our biggest news is the introduction of our new black cat, Merlin. He’s about a year and a half old. He’s a feisty, fun, talkative, lovey cat and we are so happy to have him. Our other cats aren’t as sure about having him in the family, especially because Merlin took no time at all to insert himself as a central figure in our home. We are all adjusting, some of us a little easier than others.

Tonight Ela and I watched the 1993 version of the movie, The Secret Garden. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend. If you haven’t watched the movie, I recommend.

The Secret Garden was one of my favorite books as a kid. I felt like Mary Lennox in my soul. I felt alone. But I was curious and stubborn. I believed in miracles. I had a hidden magical garden in my heart. I looked for magic everywhere. I wanted to defy all the odds.

As I look back over my life, I believe I have discovered and awakened beautiful forgotten gardens long thought to be dead over and over both in my own life and in support others on a similar journey. Watching the movie last night had me in tears. Life, Death, Rebirth. Can we trust the magic? Especially in the seasons of death. Can we trust that the spiraling truth of Life is Life, Death, and Rebirth?

We live on a magical planet. Life is a magical unfolding. If you’ve lost connection to the wonder and magic of this beautiful, heart wrenching planet, re-read Mary Oliver’s poem SOMETIMES and read or watch The Secret Garden. Let your self be enchanted once again.

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.”

―Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

May the beauty and magic of nature romance you back to Life,

emie kay

I just spent the last two days reading a novel. Doing very little of anything else. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that. It’s not that I can’t. I just don’t. Even after a decade of practices to help me feel that I’m safe enough to slow down and rest, I still find myself running or hiding…

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Hello Beautiful Humans,

In this monthly touch in, you’ll find:

• Poem of the month: The Orange by Wendy Cope

• Reflections on Celebrating the Gift of Being Alive

• Local Healer Highlight: Retreat Opportunity with Carly Sears in July

• Womb Wisdom Initiation Offering with Emie: Embody, Empower, Express

• Personal Share: Photo Celebration

• Song of the Month: I Lived by One Republic

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Poem of the Month: The Orange by Wendy Cope

Ela (my youngest kiddo) read this poem in their graduation speech. After a long struggle with severe anxiety, choosing this poem to highlight their current experience is a true testament to all their/our work to be able to declare that they live in their body with more peace and with a true gratitude for existing.

I’m celebrating Ela and how far they have come over these years. I’m inviting all of you into a moment of slowing down and appreciating the little things that might help you feel glad that you exist in a world that may be giving you a hundred reasons to feel that existing as your Self or in your particular body is a difficult experience. Please know, I love you. I’m glad you exist.

The Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

— Wendy Cope

Reflections on Celebrating The Gift of Being Alive

A beautiful part of my work as a trauma informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist, a Sex, Love, Feminine Spirituality Coach, and Wild, Witchy Woman Initiatrix is to help people first identify the map they think they are on and then help them discover different maps that might be a better fit for their real life experience and most soulfully aligned values.

Many of you know I often speak about life, death, rebirth maps, spiral maps, seasonal and cyclical maps, nature and organic time maps. But the specific map I’ve been meditating on quite a bit lately is a map of the long game of romance, conception, gestation, labor, delivery, postpartum, growth and development, launching and releasing and then celebrating the whole damn process map.

The greatest experiment of my life has been The Locke Experiment, birthing, mothering and home schooling four wild humans. We are transitioning into a whole new era of what the community in our home will feel like graduating my youngest kiddo from high school and launching my 21 year old out into the world this fall. I’m thinking a lot about the maps I had when my kids were little and the maps I have found and followed through the last decade of my life as a single mother holding it all.

I moved from a patriarchal, linear, striving for perfection and ascension map to a feminine womb cosmology map that centers the Life Giving Womb and Feminine Sexuality as central. Placing myself and my Locke Experiment on this feminine womb cosmology map (along with everything else I’ve been romanced into gestating, birthing, nurturing and releasing into the world) has changed everything for me in terms of how and when I celebrate.

I am learning to allow myself to Live the present moments more fully. I’m not waiting for a finish line. I’m not waiting until the accomplishment. I’m living, grieving, embracing, celebrating the small moments, breathing into the beauty and the changes as they happen in real time.

In the Wild Woman Group Initiations that Erin Lindsey and I lead together and in my Womb Wisdom one on one Initiations that I hold, one of the phrases we lean into is “Receiving the Gift of My Life in this moment.” This phrase invites us into a deep practice. Life is a gift. This moment.
And now this one.
And now this one.
And the next and the one that is excruciating
and the moment that is bliss.
Each moment.
Can I anchor into I AM and hold the loving awareness that I am receiving the gift of my life in this moment, with this breath, no matter what this moment is like? What happens when we contact that depth of truth inside our own being and body?

The joy of being alive, the gift of being human is not fun. It’s not easy.
It’s an adventure.
It’s brutal. And then it’s blissful.
The joy of being alive in each moment is the practice and the ability to stay with that moment.
How present can I be with these sensations?
How present can I be with this emotion?
How present can I be with my breath through this pain?
How available am I to the actual present moment?

In light of this deep practice, each moment can have a celebratory edge. Any moment can give you cause to appreciate, celebrate, embrace, smile, cry, honor, simply breathe your way through the miraculous experience of being a human in that body in this moment.

I am alive.

I am receiving the gift of my life in this moment with this breath.

Can I lean into the joy of being alive and find a moment to celebrate? Maybe just celebrate that breath you just took. Maybe you can hug your person, your kiddo, your pet, your self and soften for a minute and celebrate a moment of connection. Or maybe just pause. Let’s try it right now.

Just pause.

Close your eyes.

Tilt your head back just a bit.

Open your arms and stretch your chest to the sky.

Take three deep breaths.

On each exhale take that breath all the way through your body out your feet into the earth.

Bring your arms in and wrap them around yourself.

I love you. I’m glad you exist.

Life is not easy peasy lemon squeezy for most people. Take a little self responsibility to create small moments throughout your day to reset and celebrate the breath breathing you, the earth holding and nourishing you, the sun energizing you, the water flowing in you. Acknowledge, feel, and maybe even celebrate the support that is constantly making it possible for you to experience your life in your body.

And if bigger moments to celebrate show up. . . PARTY!!!!! Call your friend. Go out for dinner. Take a walk under the full moon. Have a little night of witchy friend fun. Tune into your senses and allow pleasure to wake you up and fill your entire being with joy. Carve out time for your magical celebratory moments and the magical moments will increasingly find you. I promise.

If you need some support on the journey of finding new maps to follow or learning to slow down and practice receiving the gift of your life or celebrating the small or big things in your world, I would be so honored to hold space for your process of discovery into greater embodiment, empowerment, and soulful self expression. Book a BodyMindSpirit Session HERE or contact me HERE for more info.

Wondering what a BodyMindSpirit Session is about? I am a Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist. I use the modalities of Certified CranioSacral Therapy, Esalen Massage Therapy, Eco-Somatics Practices, Certified Love, Sex, Spirituality Coaching, and DreamTending to co-create a unique session for each client. I assist you in down regulating an activated nervous system, building new relationship to pain, body, sensation, emotion, breath, and trauma story in ways that support you in coming back to inner wisdom, activating the body’s innate healing capacity, and bringing more balance and peace to your life. In short, I support healing through embodiment, empowerment, & expression of true Soulful Self. Here’s a short video explaining a bit about my work.

Local Healer Highlight: RETREAT OPPORTUNITY with Carly Sears

I’m excited to share this fabulous event in Visalia, CA that Carly Sears is leading/hosting in July for 12 women. Take a moment to read her invitation below and feel if you are drawn to be one of the 12 women who will have this opportunity to slow down and reconnect to your embodied soulful self and remember your Belonging. Carly is passionate, powerful, and devoted to living Life in authenticity and through her centered wholeness.

Belonging To Yourself: A Weekend Retreat for Women

Friday July 10th 7pm - Sunday July 12th 10am

If you spend most of your time taking care of others, holding everything together, and pushing through your day… this space is for you.

This retreat is an invitation to slow down, step away from daily demands, and come back to yourself—without pressure or needing to have it all figured out.

It’s also about being in a space with other women who get it. No need to perform, just real connection, honesty, and support.

Through simple guided practices, movement, and conversation, we’ll explore how to feel more at home in our bodies, understand different parts of ourselves, and create space for all of who we are—without judgment.

This will be a sleepover event in a beautiful Airbnb in Visalia with a pool and private chef. It is organized and led by Carly Sears, who is trained in embodied facilitation, spiral dynamics, and left hand path teachings. Cost is $500 and includes lodging, meals, and all group practices. Only 12 spots available. For any questions, please reach out to Carly on Instagram. (@carly.jo.the.magnificent)

If your heart feels called to this, then please click on the following link to reserve your spot! https://forms.gle/roqQVAW8xCvSqa138

Womb Wisdom Initiation: 9 Month One on One Coaching Container

You have done the body work.

You have done the therapy.

You have a spiritual practice.

You have a movement practice.

You’ve reconnected to your womb/sexuality.

You have attained some level of healing and/or success. You might be a healer, a practitioner, a teacher, an entrepreneur, an artist, a mom, a CEO, a spiritual leader. You’re ambitious and creative.

You’ve located problem after problem and found solutions, shifted your lifestyle, and done the work. Your quality of life, creative endeavors, business, mind, and spirituality are vastly different than you were a decade ago. People look to you, rely on you, and trust your wisdom.

But you’re still striving. And you’re tired of that. You’re stuck in a patriarchal model of producing and marketing and living in a linear way.

You’re sick of the rat race and the pressure to get it right, do more, be more, say it right, look right, produce enough.

You’d like to simply BE.

You’d like to truly flow with seasons and cycles and trust that Life has you through it all even if you go against the way it’s “supposed to be.”

You’d like to Live your Authentic Soulful Self from a more honest center. You’d like your work to come from Peace rather than working and striving to get somewhere.

You’d like to live in more harmonious rhythms of Life, Death, Rebirth aligned with nature and organic time rather than man made time. You’d like to learn to truly live and create from a womb cosmology that follows true womb wisdom and feminine templates encoded in all of Life rather than continue the patriarchally driven industrial complex mentality.

You’d like to enjoy this game of Living as a Divine Soul in a human body but you’re not quite sure how to anchor that in every day life.

The world needs women to slow down, drop in and Embody, Empower, and Soulfully Express their Goddess Essence through their unique Humanity. Now is the time to be the Main Character of your own Life. Now is the time to follow your Divine Soul Essence into more Freedom, Joy, Beauty, Peace and Powerful Creation. Now is the time to learn how to speak your FUCK YES and FUCK NO from your Roots, up through your Dragon Sacral Center, with the power of your Jaguar Solar Plexus Power, connected to your Compassionate and Wise, Nourished Heart Center, up through your unique Voice to share your creativity and Life in the world wearing your gorgeous Goddess Crown through it all.

In this 9 month Womb Wisdom Initiation Coaching Container we will meet weekly for 60-90 minute sessions either in person or on zoom. I will give you easy but potent practices to consistently drop underneath the familial, cultural, religious conditioning and chosen self protective layers that helped you survive your world when you needed to be loved, accepted, and resourced by your family, religion of origin, and the community you were born into.

We will do specific eco-somatic practices to support nervous system regulation and embodiment. This methodolgy comes from Dr. Azra Bertrand’s pioneering work to build connection and communion with Nature and evolutionary eco-ancestoral support waiting to be unlocked in our biology and DNA. You will be more connected to your inner resourcing, inner wisdom, intuition, and magical self. You will truly learn to feel the support of Earth, Breath, Water, Sunlight, and Guides as you live and create from your Divine Soul Essence through your humanity.

We will have easy but potent phrases we will work with to access your I AM Divine Soul Essence and unravel the cultural, religious, and familial programing that keep you in service to systems you no longer believe in but feel compelled to “adhere to.”

The work we will do together will help you shift your consciousness from an enmeshment with small self protectors and programming to wake up to your Divine Self and the Truth of the Present Moment. You will get good at dropping into the Observer Self, the I AM and moving with what is Alive for you to do, say, or hold in the present moment. From your I AM, you will practice

1. Noticing the layers of sensation, thought, story, emotion, old beliefs.

2. Holding those layers in loving awareness (without judgement)

3. Breathing, moving, sounding, touching through any stored body or nervous system information that keeps you stuck in old patterns

4. Then playing with it all in the I AM Loving Awareness Consciousness. This is when life gets fun no matter what the circumstances are.

If you commit to the simple practices of playing with embodiment, empowerment, and expression of truth in the present moment, you will

• know your True Soulful Self and hold the layers of your protectors in love

• feel empowered to live and speak your Truth with increasing confidence

• feel more embodied and connected to organic rhythms of nature and your body

• feel more supported by Life

• enjoy the game of Life a little (or a lot) more than you currently are

Life is not a problem to solve. It is an experience to live.

You are not a problem to solve. You are a unique expression of Life, the Divine being lived as YOU in the world with every miraculous breath you breathe.

This is the most potent offering I have. It is not for everyone. If you are curious, let’s hop on a discovery call. I want us both to know that this is the right time for you to make this intense investment of 9 months of your time, energy and money.

For more information, check out the descriptions HERE. To book a Discovery Call connect HERE.

One spot has filled. I have 2 spots left for one on one Womb Wisdom Initiation. Start date can be anytime after June 1st.

I look forward to working together.

embodied, empowered, soulfully expressed,

emie kay

Song of the Month: I Lived by One Republic

This song was one of my theme songs ten years ago as I was getting divorced. I hoped that someday I would be truly living and not just escaping and surviving. I have interesting feelings listening to this song these days. Life keeps moving. Even back then, in some of my most difficult days, knowing I needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other, Life was holding me, leading me, sustaining me, resourcing me with Breath, Water, Earth and Sun. Looking back I know it. Walking through it, I just hoped I would make it. I celebrate that version of me that took the jump, feared the fall, and made it to this moment. For me. For my kids. For the joy of living my soulful Self into the world with more embodiment, empowerment, and authentic soulful expression.

May you know Life holding, loving, resourcing you through every experience,

emie kay

I Lived

Hope when you take that jump
You don’t fear the fall
Hope when the water rises
You built a wall
Hope when the crowd screams out
It’s screaming your name
Hope if everybody runs
You choose to stay

Hope that you fall in love
And it hurts so bad
The only way you can know
You give it all you have
And I hope that you don’t suffer
But take the pain
Hope when the moment comes you’ll say

I, I did it all
I, I did it all
I owned every second that this world could give
I saw so many places
The things that I did
Yeah, with every broken bone
I swear I lived

Hope that you spend your days
But they all add up
And when that sun goes down
Hope you raise your cup
Oh, oh
I wish that I could witness
All your joy
And all your pain
But until my moment comes, I’ll say

I, I did it all
I, I did it all
I owned every second that this world could give
I saw so many places
The things that I did
Yeah, with every broken bone
I swear I lived

Erin is my best friend of the last 16 years. We’ve been through so much life together. I wrote about our friendship in Part 2 of Heathen, Heretic, Witch, Whore under the Soul Sisterhood Salvation section. Our soulful evolution has absolutely been connected to the support and security of this friendship. I love her no matter what. She loves me no matter …

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Hello Beautiful Humans,

In this April monthly touch in you’ll find:

• Poem of the Month: Spring by Mary Oliver

• CranioSacral Therapy Awareness Month: Special Offer

• Local Healer Highlight: Dr. Ciara Lopez

• Womb Wisdom Initiation Offering: Embody, Empower, Express

• Personal Share: Life Force of Spring Reflection

Poem of the Month: Spring by Mary Oliver

SPRING

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

CranioSacral Therapy Awareness Month

I am a Certified CranioSacral Therapist through Upledger Institute. For specific explanations, please check out this article and the Upledger Website. Many bodyworkers take CranioSacral classes but few go the route of actually getting certified. It’s quite the process. I have the training to explain CranioSacral Therapy through scientific language that may or may not convince you that CST is a legitimate option for your healing journey. But I don’t want to do that. I built a thriving Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapeutic Practice over the last decade specifically without trying to convince anyone that they need me. You don’t. I don’t want to convince you. I don’t want to promise you something. I don’t want to hook you with a selling point. I just don’t. And if you need convincing, I welcome you to find someone who loves to technically teach, explain and convince. It’s not my desire or forte. You find me or you don’t. We resonate or we don’t. Life leads the people to me that I can support. I trust that with my entire being.

I believe in the work that I do. CranioSacral Therapy is my favorite hands on modality that I am trained in. It is gentle. It is deep. It is relaxing. It is scientifically backed. It supports your BodyMindSpirit to return to alignment and its innate ability to heal. This modality can help resolve pain and support physical, emotional, mental, spiritual healing. This modality can help you be more embodied, empowered and soulfully expressed in the world.

I do not practice a biomedical model. I do not adhere to a medical industrial complex model. I practice with a holistic approach, taking into consideration your relationship to your own body, your pain, your connection to nature, your emotions, your sensations, your family system, your faith structures, your work environment, your ability to nourish and care for yourself. Your pain does not exist in isolation from the rest of your life.

I help people find natural, cyclical rhythms and maps of life to flow with. I help people know themselves and feel agency within their own body and experience after trauma, injury, chronic stress or life transitions. I help people feel safe enough to slow down and rest after a lifetime of living in fight, flight, freeze or fawn states. I give people easy tools and practices that facilitate people getting honest about themselves, their lives, their pain, their present moments in order to Live more fully in ways that are aligned with their soul truth.

I found CranioSacral Therapy when I was recovering from a severe car accident in April of 2015. Over the course of a year, my CranioSacral Therapist and a team of healers helped me recover from a severe concussion, whip lash, and intense neck, back and pelvic pain. My CST practitioner was skilled at holding loving awareness for stuck emotion and relational patterns to shift as well meeting the physical pain points.

I fell in love with the gentle depth of this healing modality. My body pain wasn’t seen in isolation from my whole person or the scope of my life. She allowed all of me to show up in the sessions. Yes, there was body pain from the car accident and intense symptoms with the concussion, but what I didn’t realize was that I also had a whole lot of emotional and relational pain held in my body that no one had ever been able to meet me in prior to my experience of CranioSacral Therapy. As she allowed my emotions and relational issues to be spoken and felt and held in loving awareness, deep pain started to resolve in my body. I built new relationship to my body, to the sensations, to the emotions, and to my circumstances. I became more empowered, more intimately connected to my body and the way it was speaking to me and supporting me. I found the courage to live into my soul aligned truths with the help of CranioSacral Therapy. And I healed from the neck, back, pelvic pain and the whiplash and concussion symptoms.

Now I create safe enough space for those who need the kind of support I needed through my recovery. You may come in with a specific pain. I will be with you as a whole person. We will hold everything that wants to be held with love, curiosity and gentleness. We will meet it in a way that allows your nervous system to recognize the safety of the present moment and relax into a state that supports healing. We will help expand your window of tolerance at a rate that will help you manage your life and stress easier. You will build new relationships to your pain, your sensations, your emotions, your stories, your patterns. Your body will begin to feel like your safe home rather than something that is unknowable and betraying you.

Whether you are on the table because of body pain, emotional pain, mental health, spiritual work, simply needing relaxation, a reset or a combination of reasons, CranioSacral Therapy will give your BodyMindSpirit a chance to feel held, heard, and supported. Maybe your specific issue will not totally resolve. Maybe you will need to find a very specific doctor or practitioner to support your need differently than our work can. Many of my clients have a team of support on their healing journey. In my space, you will be held in honor, love, and gentleness through our time together. Within the gift of safe enough space, you may discover new ways of listening to and relating to your Self, your Body and your experiences that will support you living a more peaceful, connected, joyful life.

SPECIAL OFFER in honor of CranioSacral Therapy Awareness Month:
BOOK HERE
** New client sessions for the remainder of April through the end of May: 90 minute introductory session is $150 (June 1st all new client first sessions return to 90 min for $225).

** If the new client mentions you as the referral, you will receive $75 off your next 90 minute BodyMindSpirit Session. You will pay $150 for 90 minutes instead of the normal $225. You must use this discount by the end of June 2026.

** If you want to gift a “new to emie” client a CranioSacral Session between now and the end of May, you can buy a gift certificate for $150 for their first 90 minute session. The gift certificate must be used within a year of purchase date. Gift Certificate Purchase HERE or contact me.

BOOK HERE

If the person you refer has questions or needs more info, please have them text me at 559-372-9021 or email at emie@findbalancedliving.com or forward this newsletter.

Love and peace to all of you,
emie

Wondering what a BodyMindSpirit Session is about? I am a Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist. I use the modalities of Certified CranioSacral Therapy, Esalen Massage Therapy, Eco-Somatics Practices, Certified Love, Sex, Spirituality Coaching, and DreamTending to co-create a unique session for each client. I assist you in down regulating an activated nervous system, building new relationship to pain, body, sensation, emotion, breath, and trauma story in ways that support you in coming back to inner wisdom, activating the body’s innate healing capacity, and bringing more balance and peace to your life. In short, I support healing through embodiment, empowerment, & expression of true Soulful Self. Here’s a short video explaining a bit about my work.

Local Healer Highlight: Dr. Ciara Cappo Lopez

Dr. Ciara Cappo Lopez is an incredible human, woman, mom, chiropractor and healing practitioner, creator, curator of spaces and collaborative community. If you are led to work with her, you will be seen as a whole person, honored on your specific journey, treated with knowledge, care, and wisdom. Check out her website and offerings HERE. Read more about her work below.

My work sits at the intersection of chiropractic care, nervous system regulation, and holistic support for women and families, while also extending into performance care for athletes and movement-focused individuals. I primarily serve those in the prenatal, postpartum, and early childhood seasons, student athletes and active adults who are looking to maintain, restore, and optimize the way their bodies move and adapt.

In practice, I blend gentle, neurologically-focused chiropractic adjustments with a deeper understanding of functional movement, birth physiology, and performance demands. My approach is both clinical and intuitive—grounded in evidence, but always centered on the lived experience of the person in front of me. Whether supporting a mother through postpartum recovery or helping an athlete improve resilience and prevent injury, the goal remains the same: to create more capacity, adaptability, and ease within the body.

My clientele often includes mothers seeking support during pregnancy and postpartum, infants and children needing support for nervous system development, and movement-focused individuals who want to enhance performance, recover well, and stay consistent in their training. Many are looking not just for symptom relief, but for a space that feels safe, collaborative, and attuned—where their bodies are listened to and their experiences are respected.

At the heart of my work is a commitment to creating environments that foster connection, education, and healing—where care extends beyond the adjustment table and into community, empowerment, and sustainable, long-term wellbeing.

My website is www.solareom.com

I look forward to connecting and supporting you on your wellness journey.

Dr. Ciara Cappo Lopez
www.solareom.com
Schedule your appointment: www.cappochiropractic.janeapp.com
Visalia, CA

Womb Wisdom Initiation: 9 Month One on One Coaching Container

You have done the body work.

You have done the therapy.

You have a spiritual practice.

You have a movement practice.

You have attained some level of healing and/or success. You might be a healer, a practitioner, a teacher, an entrepreneur, an artist, a mom, a CEO, a spiritual leader. You’re ambitious and creative.

You’ve located problem after problem and found solutions, shifted your lifestyle, and done the work. Your quality of life, creative endeavors, business, mind, and spirituality are vastly different than you were a decade ago. People look to you, rely on you, and trust your wisdom.

But you’re still striving. And you’re tired of that. You’re stuck in a patriarchal model of producing and marketing and living in a linear way.

You’re sick of the rat race and the pressure to get it right, do more, be more, say it right, look right, produce enough.

You’d like to simply BE.

You’d like to truly flow with seasons and cycles and trust that Life has you through it all even if you go against the way it’s “supposed to be.”

You’d like to Live your Authentic Soulful Self from a more honest center. You’d like your work to come from Peace rather than working and striving to get somewhere.

You’d like to live in more harmonious rhythms of Life, Death, Rebirth aligned with nature and organic time rather than man made time. You’d like to learn to truly live and create from a womb cosmology that follows true womb wisdom and feminine templates encoded in all of Life rather than continue the patriarchally driven industrial complex mentality.

You’d like to enjoy this game of Living as a Divine Soul in a human body but you’re not quite sure how to anchor that in every day life.

The world needs women to slow down, drop in and Embody, Empower, and Soulfully Express their Goddess Essence through their unique Humanity. Now is the time to be the Main Character of your own Life. Now is the time to follow your Divine Soul Essence into more Freedom, Joy, Beauty, Peace and Powerful Creation. Now is the time to learn how to speak your FUCK YES and FUCK NO from your Roots, up through your Dragon Sacral Center, with the power of your Jaguar Solar Plexus Power, connected to your Compassionate and Wise, Nourished Heart Center, up through your unique Voice to share your creativity and Life in the world wearing your gorgeous Goddess Crown through it all.

In this 9 month Womb Wisdom Initiation Coaching Container we will meet weekly for 60-90 minute sessions either in person or on zoom. I will give you easy but potent practices to consistently drop underneath the familial, cultural, religious conditioning and chosen self protective layers that helped you survive your world when you needed to be loved, accepted, and resourced by your family, religion of origin, and the community you were born into.

We will do specific eco-somatic practices to support nervous system regulation and embodiment. This methodolgy comes from Dr. Azra Bertrand’s pioneering work to build connection and communion with Nature and evolutionary eco-ancestoral support waiting to be unlocked in our biology and DNA. You will be more connected to your inner resourcing, inner wisdom, intuition, and magical self. You will truly learn to feel the support of Earth, Breath, Water, Sunlight, and Guides as you live and create from your Divine Soul Essence through your humanity.

We will have easy but potent phrases we will work with to access your I AM Divine Soul Essence and unravel the cultural, religious, and familial programing that keep you in service to systems you no longer believe in but feel compelled to “adhere to.”

The work we will do together will help you shift your consciousness from an enmeshment with small self protectors and programming to wake up to your Divine Self and the Truth of the Present Moment. You will get good at dropping into the Observer Self, the I AM and moving with what is Alive for you to do, say, or hold in the present moment. From your I AM, you will practice

1. Noticing the layers of sensation, thought, story, emotion, old beliefs.

2. Holding those layers in loving awareness (without judgement)

3. Breathing, moving, sounding, touching through any stored body or nervous system information that keeps you stuck in old patterns

4. Then playing with it all in the I AM Loving Awareness Consciousness. This is when life gets fun no matter what the circumstances are.

If you commit to the simple practices of playing with embodiment, empowerment, and expression of truth in the present moment, you will

• know your True Soulful Self and hold the layers of your protectors in love

• feel empowered to live and speak your Truth with increasing confidence

• feel more embodied and connected to organic rhythms of nature and your body

• feel more supported by Life

• enjoy the game of Life a little (or a lot) more than you currently are

Life is not a problem to solve. It is an experience to live.

You are not a problem to solve. You are a unique expression of Life, the Divine being lived as YOU in the world with every miraculous breath you breathe.

This is the most potent offering I have. It is not for everyone. If you are curious, let’s hop on a discovery call. I want us both to know that this is the right time for you to make this intense investment of 9 months of your time, energy and money.

For more information, check out the descriptions HERE. To book a Discovery Call connect HERE.

I have spots for 3 coaching clients. Start date can be anytime after June 1st.

I look forward to working together.

embodied, empowered, soulfully expressed,
emie kay

Personal Share: Reflections on Life Force of Spring

I purposefully start my days slow as often as I can. I make my coffee infused with Rose elixir and sit out in my beautiful back yard soaking up the morning sun. I do my biomantic breathwork and gentle primordial movement. I prepare for the day ahead by communing with Sun, Earth, Breath, and Water. I continually let my whole being feel that I am loved, I am held, and I am resourced by something bigger than me.

The tangible expression of that “something bigger” is the Earth, the Breath, the Sun, the Water.

Life Force is in the mystery of breath.

Life Force is in the flow of the water.

Life Force is in the nourishment and holding of the earth.

Life Force is in the Sunlight infusing my earth and cells with Life.

I am a beautiful, unique expression of Life Force flowing through this particular piece of earth, animated by the Breath of Life, energized by the Sun, nourished by the earth, and flowing with the ancient wisdom of water. And so are you.

I live in the reality of the Divine Romance. I am alive. Life is breathing me. Life is moving me. Life is resourcing me. Life is energizing me to be ME in the world. Spring is such a wonderful time of year to open to the romancing of Life through the beauty and miracles of creative fiery Life Force calling to all your senses.

Can you feel the fire of spring bursting forth? Are you appreciating the miracles popping through everywhere?

I invite you to slow down with me just a bit this next week. Receive the beauty of the moment through your breath, your eyes, your ears, your touch, your smell, your taste. Receive it. Savor it. Enjoy it. Let Life move you just a little more than you usually do. Let yourself enjoy the sensual these next weeks of spring.

This month has held so much beauty and pain for me.

I had the joy of taking my kids to my favorite Broadway musical this month. This was my fourth experience of Hadestown. I’ve been so excited to share this experience with them. It was powerful and heart wrenchingly beautiful.

One of my besties from Portland came to spend Easter weekend with me and my kids. She’s a soul sister of 23 years and also a CranioSacral Therapist. Our time was full of depth, tears, joy, holding one another, and soul communion.

Another bestie and I went on a weekend away. Roses and Re-membering the Rose Lineage within was the theme. It was magical and powerful. Another stake in the ground we will return to in Re-membering and moving forward with the call of Life to continue creating and evolving and Being our most authentic version of ourselves in the world. Even when that feels terrifying.

And there has been sadness and pain in my process this month. I continue to meet and hold in loving awareness the barriers within me that create fear of expansion and growth. I keep allowing myself to meet the truth in order to be more free to live my present moments with less past story attached. I allow myself to see and experience the truth about life and people and events in the present moment so that I can make honest and soul aligned decisions about my work in the world moving forward. I’m working through some very real fear of judgment and rejection in order to step into the next version of my leadership in The Cauldron & The Feast and Wild Woman Initiation Containers. It’s not easy. But it is worth it.

All of this is held within the perspective of the Joy of Being Alive. Every sensation. Every emotion. Every experience. Every challenge. Every pattern. Every invitation to new growth. All of this is the Joy of Being Alive as a Divine Soul in a human body. I welcome it all. I have learned to savor it all. And lean into the support of Earth, Breath, Sun, Water, and Sisterhood.

My hope for you is that you will know in your blood and bones that you are loved, held, and supported by Life through every moment you experience in this earthen body. I hope you find the Joy of Being Alive. I hope you find your tribe and your soul aligned movements in the world. The world needs our unique and powerful voice and creation and presence to be guiding lights in tumultuous times.

May you feel the fire of Life Force moving through you,
Living in Love,
emie kay

The next piece of Heathen, Heretic, Witch, Whore is working me over. So I’m letting it. It will arrive when it arrives. Until then . . . my ramblings continue.

I ran from my womanhood for a portion of my life. I hated being a woman. I hated women. I hated men, too. Ultimately, I hated myself. I felt alone in human relationships. In childhood and teen hood, I found connection to the Other World/Jesus, Nature, and my cat as my only sources of true companionship.

My relationship with women began shifting at age 19 after I left home. But it would be a long road before the Goddess would Resurrect for me and within me. In college, I met an incredible woman who knew how to create safety in community. I will forever have the deepest gratitude to Dean Mary for her example of strong, compassionate womanhood creating safe enough community to foster authenticity. She took me under her wing and gave me my first taste of how rewarding women supporting women can feel and how healing and safe friendships with women can be.

But I’m getting way ahead of the story. Back up with me.

Read more

Hello Beautiful Humans,

In my March monthly touch in you’ll find:

• Reflections on Receiving the Light: Spring Equinox Portal

• Poem of the Month: When I am Among the Trees by Mary Oliver

• Local Healer Highlight/Online Retreat Opportunity with Jodi Golden-Lund

• Book of the Month: Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman

• Personal Share: COS 2026 Juried Student Art Exhibition & The end of an era in the Locke Experiment

• Song of the Month: Rebirth by Aisha Badru

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Receiving The Light

We are in the Equinox Portal. The Light you allow yourself to engage with and receive in this next 10 day window is key information for the health of your entire body, mind, and spirit.

Let yourself be a little imaginal with me. Soften your logic brain just a tad. In fact, take a deep breath with me.

Tip your head back like you’re putting your face in the sun. Soften and smile.

Let the light melt through your mind, relaxing your thoughts as it draws your awareness into your back brain.

Rest there, smile on your face in the sunshine, relaxing your thoughts and breathing deep.

Relax your forehead,
your eye sockets,
your ears,
your cheeks,
your jaw,
your throat,
your shoulders,
your torso,
your pelvic bowl,
all the way down to your feet.

Big breath in. On the exhale, sigh out loud and imagine Light flowing down your spinal cord. Can you relax the muscles around your spine? Can you imagine the flowing center of your spinal cord relaxing and allowing all the nerves that send messages to and from your brain to soften just a bit?

Can you allow Light to fill that central channel of your body. How radiant can you be in the center? How much Light can your body hold? Can you imagine that Light radiating its beauty, its healing information into every tissue, cell, fluid, space inside the universe of you?

My invitation to you is to spend several moments each morning through the end of March receiving the Light. Can you strengthen a loving relationship to Light, Dark, Earth, Breath, & Water? If you put even a little attention on your relationship with these elements they will positively impact your mind, your biology, your emotions, your spirituality over time.

If you have a spiritual practice that links the Divine with Light, then you might really enjoy embodying that teaching by engaging the Sunlight and allowing your biology to shift with the Divine codes of Equinox Light. If you don’t have a spiritual practice that links the Divine and Light, then the invitation is simply to actively put yourself in the morning Light, soften, open and receive.

Let this practice be simple. Let it be nourishing. Let it be playful.

For a more scientific yet relational explanation of this little practice, please read Dr. Azra Bertrand’s teaching HERE.

“If everything around you seems dark, look again, you might be the light.”
— Rumi

If you need a little extra support slowing down, regulating your nervous system, shifting your relationship to emotion, sensation, story, body, I am honored to hold space for you in a BodyMindSpirit Session. Reach out if you have questions or need support.

Wondering what a BodyMindSpirit Session is about? I am a Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist. I use the modalities of Certified CranioSacral Therapy, Esalen Massage Therapy, Eco-Somatics Practices, Certified Love, Sex, Spirituality Coaching, and DreamTending to co-create a unique session for each client. I assist you in down regulating an activated nervous system, building new relationship to pain, body, sensation, emotion, breath, and trauma story in ways that support you in coming back to inner wisdom, activating the body’s innate healing capacity, and bringing more balance and peace to your life. In short, I support healing through embodiment, empowerment, & expression of true Soulful Self. Here’s a short video explaining a bit about my work.

When I am Among the Trees by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The Light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
”and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with Light and to shine.”

LISTEN TO MARY OLIVER READ HERE

Local Healer Highlight: Meet Jodi Golden-Lund

My dear soul sister and local pastor, Jodi Golden-Lund is offering an online retreat April 17th from 10-11:30 am. REGISTER HERE by booking the Reclaiming Rest Retreat.

Jodi is an extraordinary woman of compassion, wisdom, life experience, and depth of study and strength. She has overcome many of her own difficulties while continually exploring the path to more of her own centeredness and love to authentically lead others into theirs. If you are drawn to work with her, she will be a trustworthy guide.

Jodi also offers one to one coaching to address personal goals, centered living, ministry or life challenges. Jodi will partner with you to discover and live your purpose. She also offer online and in person retreats focusing on rest, renewal, and sabbath practice. For more information, contact Jodi HERE.

Book of the Month: Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman

I received this book as a gift and keep it in the stack of my morning meditations. This book calls to me frequently. The images & phrases invite me to drop in, ponder, and feel. It is a tribute to women and all the things we hold from glorious to mundane.

Here is a short review of the book.

“Women Holding Things, a stunning illustrated book, explores the significance of the objects we carry―in our hands, hearts, and minds―and speaks to, and for, all of us. Maira Kalman’s unique work is a celebration of life, of the act and the art of living, offering an original way of examining and understanding all that is important in our world―and ultimately within ourselves.”

Personal Share

I’m featuring Ash and Ela this month. Both of them have 2 pieces of artwork chosen to be displayed in the 2026 Juried Student Exhibition at the COS Art Gallery in Kaweah Building Room 214. An open house reception is Thursday, April 9th from 5-7. Come pick your favorite piece for the People’s Choice Award by 5:30 that evening. FREE FOOD AND FREE PARKING IN LOT 7 (Introverts beware. . . this is a crowded time to visit this exhibit! Meaning. . . you will not find me there at that time.) The Exhibit is open to the public April 7th through May 9th. Visit anytime.

From now until May, my life is consumed with finishing an era of 21 years of homeschooling and 26 years of intense parenting (10 of those years as a single parent).

No one could have prepared my heart for these days. I feel tender. I feel proud. It feels incredulous. It’s everything and nothing all at once.

I chose to center these humans and their growth and development for over two decades in insane amounts of unconventional. The decade of rebuilding our lives after the divorce, building my business, and trying to parent them is a blur right now as time vacillates between crawling and zipping by.

Is this real? Are we really here? Did I make it? Make it to what?

The last two years we have worked hard to shift from parent/child relationships to living in collaborative, peaceful community with each other. I spent many hours with my therapist working through the transition from focused parenting to shared community values and appreciating each other as humans rather than tolerating each other in familial obligation. It continues to be the most beautiful experiment I’ve ever led.

And now it’s all changing again.

Seasons, cycles, endings, beginnings. My heart would absolutely crack and crumble without the blueprints of the spiraling life honored and tested over and over. Life, death, rebirth. No straight lines. Only spirals.

And yet, even in honoring the maps, if I want to stay close to the authentic human experience, to the present moment, I must allow my heart to feel through the grief, feel through the joys, feel the time slipping away, and allow it . . . allow it all. This is the Joy of Being Alive in a human body. Every last drop of love, grief, longing, leaving, arriving, feeling, numbing, rage, bliss and sorrow is the human experience. I want to move through it all with every part of me awake to it.

and then sometimes I want to sleep for days to escape the intensity of it all

Ela is on the home stretch toward graduation in May. We are checking off the boxes and honoring and enjoying the last of everything. Last testing season, last meetings, last drama practices, last spring break, last school trip, last school dance, last performances. Eleanor Roosevelt Community Learning Center has been a home away from home from 15 of the 21 years. We are ready to be done. There is deep emotion at every turn.

Some of the pictures above were from Ela’s senior photo shoot with Tracy Navarro. When Ela was in grade school they had a dream of taking senior photos at the old yellow truck in Lemon Cove on the way to Three Rivers. It was a tear jerker moment for me as we fulfilled that childhood wish.

Another milestone was Ash turning 21 on March 15th (center photo). Finishing massage school, finding a job, taking art, anthropology and philosophy classes, activism, reading insane amounts, and maintaining deep friendships has kept Ash busy over these last couple years. This is a transitional year for Ash as well.

We are on the stretch of lasts as they plan to move to the coast this fall to launch into the real world. It’s time and we all honor that. But omg. Nothing makes the mundane moments sweeter than knowing they are coming to an end. We are savoring game nights, movie nights, morning coffee in the sun, lazy afternoons of all of us reading and simply enjoying being together. Every once in awhile I just need to cry for the beauty of it all and the way it’s ending.

Thanks for journeying with me. I might be a guide for you. I might be someone who creates safe enough space for you to know yourself a little better and embody your truth a little more confidently. I might be someone who helps you navigate your transitions and deaths and rebirths. I might be someone who helps you build different relationship to sensation, emotion, story, trauma, and self regulating. No matter how I support you, I’ve always wanted to remain human in my work. I have been up close and personal in the experience of leaders, teachers, gurus elevated to greater than human status. It never goes well for anyone in the long run. I am committed to remaining human, sharing personal stories, and unveiling some of my vulnerable experiences. Thank you for holding them as little treasures I offer to you.

In this wild world, what is more precious than honoring each other as Divine Souls housed in glorious earthen bodies. May the Light of Equinox fill your soul to radiant overflowing. And may your entire BodyMindSpirit open to the glorious information of this Light that can help balance your body, energize your spirit, and center your mind. Through all the cycles and seasons ahead . . .

I bow to you, beautiful human,
emie kay

{This post was conflicting for me to write and difficult for me to post if I think about it being for you, my reader. But when I come back to my writing being for me as an expression of me in one snapshot of a moment that you get a sneak peak into. . . then I can handle it. So just remember that when you read my writing. I’m not trying to be a great storyteller for you. I’m not trying to be polished enough to be published or gain thousands of readers. (That’s for later.) I am writing because I’ve known I was a writer since first grade. My soul loves writing even if there are no readers to read it. It just so happens that some of you are reading it and you are a gift. Thank you for your understanding and grace. Read on.}

When I was nine, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe captivated me. I must have read it a half a dozen times. The magical land, Aslan the Lion, the plight of the Narnians trying to resolve their never-ending winter created by the White Witch. Little Lucy leading the way.

I felt this story in my bones. I was Lucy in my child mind. I was finding the magical portal. I was connecting to the magical savior.

Recently, I have come to understand the hope my child self was clinging to in this tale.

I was birthed through the magical portal of my mother into a lineage of women doomed to eternal winter.

I would break the spell.

Read more

Hello Beautiful Humans,

In February’s monthly touch in you’ll find:

• Reflections on Love

• Poem of the Month by Jeff Foster

• Local Healer Offering Eliza Meeker

• Song of the Month: Wild by Amber Lily

• Personal Share

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Reflections on Love

Welcome to the month of love.

Love has been a tricky concept, energy, word, experience for me. I’m sure I’m not alone in this experience.

Everyone means something a little different when we talk about “love.” Here’s how I currently work with the overarching energy of Love.

Please keep in mind, I deeply value and honor your differing experiences and definitions of “love.” This reflection is primarily centered around Source/Life Force/Unconditional Love energy that I am working with in my personal life and in my Balanced Living BodyMindSpirit Sessions, Wild Woman Circle, and Emie Kay Coaching sessions.

When I was 13, I began consciously seeking to understand and receive Love from humans and the Divine. It didn’t go so well on the human front. Not in my family of origin nor my quest for friendships or romantic connections. My personal encounters with Divine Love were beautiful and sustained me but were often overshadowed by severe conservative doctrines of fear of imperfection and punishment.

When I was 28, I devoted myself to the contemplation of a specific passage of scripture about Love (eph 3:14-21, for you bible peeps out there). I vowed I would read nothing else in scripture (after years of studying it thoroughly) until I had an embodied experience of this specific kind of Love. If it was real and knowable, then I was going to know it. (I left christianity ten years later . . . before I left that passage of verses. My truth is that Love led me out of christianity.)

I am happy to share that after 36 years devoted to the quest of Knowing Love, I now know I am continually Held, Resourced and Nourished by Love. I know that the center of my Being is Love. Love is the foundation of my courage, creativity, presence, rest, and movement in the world. I’m not working for Love . . . I’m working from Love. Love is Source. I AM anchored.

This resourcing, holding, nourishing Love is not just a great spiritual concept I spout because I learned a hundred verses about it and can argue the theology, cosmology, and doctrines of the love of god (which I did once upon a time in a very disembodied way and will never do again).

This love that I live inside of and am so confident of is expressed to and received through my BodyMindSpirit through the tangible expressions of Sun energizing me, Breath breathing me, Water flowing me, and Earth holding and nourishing me. Our physical body/nervous system needs to have intimate connection to and experiential awareness of Divine Love.

Our egoic protections we adopted to “obtain love and acceptance and provision” in our familial, cultural and religious contexts get in the way of us truly opening to and recognizing and experiencing this constant Divine Love that is sustaining us. Love is Life Force flowing through all as all in its purest essence.

Slow down and read that paragraph again.
Slowly.
Breathe deeply.
Receive Love through each breath as you read it again.

This, my friends, is a very specific way to work with the energy and concept of “love.” It is the foundation of my Being and my work in the world.

That little benediction is at the end of all my BodyMindSpirit Sessions. It was not constructed haphazardly. It was born from my lifetime quest to understand, experience, embody, trust and Be In Love continually and then share that with whomever Life would put in my path.

Your life might feel terrible right now. But you are still being unconditionally loved by Life. Maybe not by people or familial, cultural or religious systems but you are unconditionally loved, held, resourced by Life/Love. If you are to shift from a “Striving For Love” to a “Living In Love” paradigm, you must bring yourself back to a very basic, tangible rewiring of being held, loved and resourced at the most primal level.

Is the sun energizing you today? Then you are loved and resourced by Life. Go live your life . . . whether it’s shitty or beautiful. Live it knowing you are being energized by Sun. Call it Love supporting you.

Is the breath breathing you today? Then you are loved and resourced by Life. Go live your life. Whether it’s easeful or full of struggle. Live it with a conscious awareness that Life/Love wants you here. How do you know that? You are still breathing. Call the miracle of your breath Love.

Is the Earth holding you today? Then you are loved and nourished by Life. Go live your life and find a moment of gratitude that you can reach for a bite of food from the resourcing of earth and sun and be nourished. Call that holding and nourishment Love.

Is Water flowing in you today? Is your blood pumping? Is your lymph flowing? Is your CranioSacral fluid flowing? Is your fascia hydrated? If you’re reading this, then the answer is yes. Then you are loved and Living Water is flowing from within you. Go LIVE your life. . . . no matter what you meet today. Be conscious that you are Loved, you are Held, you are Resourced by Something Bigger than you. No matter how your life feels. . . you are alive and Love is sustaining you.

Be a sloth. Be a wild horse. Be a slug. Be a busy bee. Be whatever you are in this moment. Live your Life in the awareness that the Holding and Resourcing of Love does not necessitate specific action. I’m not giving you a pep talk here to DO MORE. I’m saying, consciously BE IN LOVE. No matter what you feel like, no matter what energy or vision or action you are taking or can’t take. Consciously BE IN LOVE while you are right there.

What would be different for you if you practiced this shift in consciousness?

During this month of Love. . . slow down.

Drop underneath the striving into your Divine Essence, your I AM consciousness.

Open your awareness to the Elements as expressions of Life Loving you. Go soak in the Sun. Float in the water. Intentionally breathe in the Breath. Lay on the Earth and feel her holding you. Your mind will insist that it isn’t enough. That you need more. That you need (fill in the blank) to know and feel loved.

Take a deep breath and finish this sentence:
I will feel loved when . . . .

Option 1: Permission to chase that thing. Chase it until you prove that it is or isn’t true.

Option 2: Set the chasing aside for 3 minutes a day for the next 21 days and get yourself into an experiential moment with the Divine Love of Life loving and holding and resourcing you through the sun energizing you, breath breathing you, water flowing you, and earth holding you. I don’t care how you choose to do it, just try it. Consciously name the experience as “Life is Loving Me Right Now.”

Open and receive it.

Ready?

Set?

Practice. . . .

I believe in Love. I believe in Love in you. I believe in Love holding and resourcing you unconditionally through every beautiful and shitty experience you have. The sun will shine for you and the breath will breathe you if you’re an asshole just like it will shine for you and breathe you if you’re a saint. That’s unconditional love. Will you consciously open to receive it? How will you live once you do?

If you can’t seem to touch Love and need a little help, it is my highest honor to be an expression of Divine Love holding you in a BodyMindSpirit Session. I spent a decade on a CranioSacral table, Esalen Massage therapist table, in a therapist’s office and countless coaches and teacher’s containers relearning to trust human expressions of care and compassionate love. It is a beautiful way to help reprogram a striving mind. Just remember it’s not the only way and it’s often not even the most reliable way. That said, if you need support, please reach out. Book at BodyMindSpirit Session and soften into Love.

You are Loved.

You are Held.

You are Resourced.

What if your BodyMindSpirit knew this was true?

Enjoy these contemplations,

emie kay

Wondering what a BodyMindSpirit Session is about? I am a Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist. I use the modalities of Certified CranioSacral Therapy, Esalen Massage Therapy, Eco-Somatics Practices, Certified Love, Sex, Spirituality Coaching, and DreamTending to co-create a unique session for each client. I assist you in down regulating an activated nervous system, building new relationship to pain, body, sensation, emotion, breath, and trauma story in ways that support you in coming back to inner wisdom, activating the body’s innate healing capacity, and bringing more balance and peace to your life. In short, I support healing through embodiment, empowerment, & expression of true Soulful Self. Here’s a short video explaining a bit about my work.

Poem of the Month: How to Breathe When You Can Hardly Breathe
by Jeff Foster in You Were Never Broken

And then there are the days
where you can hardly breathe
because everything has turned
to beauty and iridescence.

Because you are a witness to this ordinary world.
The ordinary burning world
that lays itself out for you effortlessly,
in all its absurdity and sanctity,
in its compassion and its terror,
in its sorrow and its light.

All One. All Art.

And you are a Doorway today.
You are a Magic Theater
where the heart plays out
its paupers and its princesses
and pretends to fluff its lines.

Do you remember. Do you remember.
His first day at school?
How he slipped through your fingers then?
So eager to leave, and did he know?

The frosted spider webs clinging to the office bins
when you went out for a quick cigarette
and how they cracked you open without warning
and how they broke you open without warning
and how you couldn’t tell a soul.
You had a secret with the spiders.

And then mother’s courage.
Her snow white hair tumbling out in your hands.
Her translucence in the last light.
Where you held her.
She had become see-through.

Some days. Some days.
You try to form words but none will come.
You try to write but the pen won’t move.
You try to speak but the silence silences.
Some days are see-through too.

It matters not how much money you have.
Your status in this world.
The strength of your immune system.
The number of weeks you have left.

It matters how completely you inhabit this life.
How deeply you let the days penetrate.
And crack you.
And make you beg for more,
for less,
for more,
for less
for more.

Don’t be ashamed to break down today!
To weep.
To laugh.
To snort.
To dribble.
To not know.
To admit all your mistakes.
All your damn mistakes.

To begin again.
To be a puddle of nothing on the ground.
To be translucent and soft.

Awakening is not a hobby, friend.
It’s a radical reframing of your entire existence.
It’s the devastation of the dreamer.

And in the rubble, such intensity.
Such ferocity.
Such light.

In the devastation we can truly meet.

And knit with the spiders at dawn.
Giggle with the afternoon crows.

Play hide-and-seek with the grown-ups;
make them forget their melancholy,
if only for a moment.

Sing star-mantras with the wolves.
And live the days.

Somehow live through the days.

Where the beauty is just too relentless.
Where we haven’t got the strength to stand.

Where we cannot breathe ourselves
and so Love breathes us instead,
and warms us from the inside,

and fills us with new hope
under an iridescent sky.

Homemade Salve from Master Healer, Eliza Meeker

I have two jars of homemade salve from Eliza Meeker for sale at my office. $40 a jar. They are infused with love and healing energy. Contact me to purchase. No delivery. Pick up at my office.

Healing Salve Ingredients

1. Oils:

   1. Castor oil: anti-inflammatory, sinks 3” into the tissues

   2. Vitamin E oil: wound healing, assists skin condition

   3. Evening Primrose oil: balancing hormones, reducing redness, reducing pain of arthritis

   4. Arnica oil: antimicrobial, anti inflammatory, helps healing

   5. Olive oil: contributes to wound healing, skin regeneration

   6. Rose hip oil: anti-inflammatory, can improve signs of aging, acne

   7. Bees’ wax from ends of meditation candles

2. Infused herbs:

   1. St. John’s wort: speeds up healing, helps nerve repair

   2. Chamomile: anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial

   3. Comfrey: promotes collagen production, assists in healing bones

   4. Mullein: may improve lubrication of the connective tissue in joints

   5. Yarrow: anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, reduces inflammation, including rosacea

3. Essential oils:

   1. Ylang ylang: relieves anxiety and nerve pain, supports skin

   2. Lavender: promotes wound healing, collagen restoration, anti-anxiety

   3. Rose absolute: improves hormone balance, reduces acne, reduces rosacea

      ---

Song of the Month: Wild by Amber Lily

Personal Share

The year of the Snake is coming to a close in a few short days. Venus/Inanna is also ending her time in the underworld soon. She will ascend to her position as Queen of Heaven once again. Life, Death, Rebirth.

These cycles are at work in my daily life. I have an intense lineage abuse story wrapping up after decades of alchemizing the pain and disorientation of incest, violence, and spiritual abuse. The timing of this closure for me personally in connection to the collective shock and disorientation of the Epstein files and ICE raids is significant.

Most of you know that the imagery of the Russian Nesting Dolls is one of my favorite. It’s my favorite because I wish someone had shared with me at the beginning of my healing journey that I had an Unbroken Center I could anchor into. I wish I would have known that I AM Whole underneath the layers of my egoic protections, my fragmented small self, my wounded inner child, my familial, cultural and religious programming. My entire healing journey changed when I discovered the unbroken Self within.

Slowing down. Dropping in to I AM. Noticing, holding, and honoring the parts of me I adopted to keep me safe in an abusive family and religious system is my practice. I don’t have to heal my broken pieces. I get to bathe them in Loving Awareness. I choose to honor the layers of my body and mind freaking out and then move from my center wholeness with courage.

I have trusted and followed Life/Love in my healing journey. When I speak of my quest to know Love . . . it was in desperation to quell the pain of my abuse. When I left home at 19 and immediately found a therapist, I could have never imagined the story would take this long or lead me to all the incredible healers, teachers, and practices to experience the gift of these last few weeks.

I feel a relief and a release from the story within the last month that I never believed I would feel in this lifetime. Was it one specific thing to bring me to this moment?

No.

It was a thousand acts of courage to find the support I needed and face the truth of my history to whatever degree my nervous system, mind, and body could handle in that season and then to practice, integrate and live out that next level of freedom and sovereignty. I am so fucking proud of myself for tenaciously following Life into greater and greater expressions of embodied Sovereignty and Freedom.

It is time for me to enter the Year of the Fire Horse free of a life long haunting story of physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse. This cycle of Inanna/Venus ascending to her throne and reclaiming her gifts and power along the way will have extra meaning for me through these next months.

May the codes and transmission of deep healing, sovereignty, freedom and love reverberate in our interconnected roots throughout the whole world.

May you remember, live into and know Love holding & resourcing you in each moment of your life,

emie kay

In Praise of Fire by John O’Donohue
from “To Bless the Space Between Us”

Read more

Hello Beautiful Humans

In January’s monthly touch in, you’ll find:

• Reflections on Balance in a Shifting World

• Poem on Being in Balance with Another by Maria Popova

• Personal reflections: Building Conscious Relationship to Life

• Song of the Month: The Way Knows the Way by Lydnsey Scott

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Balancing in a Shifting World

I have a dream of being able to walk a slack line with grace and skill. The reality of this dream is a long way off yet something in my body craves the ability to balance in impossible circumstances. (Thank you childhood trauma and my Libra Sun.)

So I bought [the kids] a slack board for Christmas.

My first attempt on the line sent me back to the 6 year old feeling learning to ride a bike. It looks easy. Why do I keep falling off? Frustration. My kids can hop on and balance with seeming ease. What am I doing wrong? Agitation built, my hatred of not being immediately good at a thing took over, and I gave up altogether that first night. Dreams of walking a slack line dashed to the floor.

I got back on the next day because I’m stubborn and determined like that.

Over the last few weeks, I’m slowly getting better. I’m learning a lot about my internal monologue and my body along the way.

I’ve had some “duh!” moments that brought us all a few good laughs.

At one point I exclaimed in exasperation, “I just want to get on here and feel solid.” One of my kids replied deadpan, “Then put a piece of tape on the floor and walk a straight line.”

BAHAHAHAHA. Expectation shift.

A few adjustments to my mental expectations changed my relationship to the slackboard practice.

• Don’t expect to feel solid on a slack line

• Expect to continually be making micro or even macro movements to stay on the line

• Play with the position of feet, body, core muscles and eye focus

• Notice breath, notice alignment, notice the ability to adjust quickly

• Relax and Play

  ---

The world is a shifting thing right now. What used to feel solid, doesn’t. What used to feel secure is tenuous. Many are feeling not just unsettled but terrified. We aren’t walking a straight line of tape on solid ground right now.

So maybe it would be helpful to change our expectations of what our body and mind and practices and experiences should be. When I expected the slack line to feel the way walking a line on the solid ground feels in my body, I was so frustrated I quit. When I changed the expectation and awareness and became super curious about what this experience on this new terrain feels like in my body and breath and mind, I began to have some fun. . . . still a lot of frustration but wayyyyyy more fun.

I’m not saying things will feel fun simply by changing our expectations but I do think we can help our bodies and minds adjust and find center with a little more conscious awareness rather than white knuckle grasping for old ways of doing life through these changing, uncertain, and often terrifying times.

Take a few deep breaths with me.

Inhale, two, three, four, five
Exhale, two, three, four, five

Inhale, two, three, four, five
Exhale, two, three, four, five

Inhale, two, three, four, five
Exhale, two, three, four, five.

The world is rapidly changing. Tighten your fists for a second or two and then release them. Place your open palms on your lap.

Do that little exercise again. Tighten your hands into fists and feel the grasping. Release the grip. Open your palms to the ceiling and place them on your lap.

Deep breath.

You can learn new ways of being. You can find new ways to use your body, your mind, your skills, your compassion, your energy. You can be part of the change in collaborative, compassionate restructuring or you can keep being frustrated that the slack line doesn’t feel like the piece of tape on the ground.

Find your inner center. Use your core. Change your focus. Breathe with consciousness. Learn a new game. For the sake of humanity and our beautiful Mother Earth, join me in learning a new way of being connected, compassionate, collaborative, and conscious even as the world is dismantling around us.

We won’t always get it right. We will fall off the slack line a thousand times. But those moments when it all comes together and the microadjustments and graceful arms balance to keep you on the line, you will feel deep joy for trying and learning and growing. If you need help meeting the fear, the old stories, the grief of instability, the grief of the state of the world, the inability to find your center when you feel constantly in fight, flight, freeze, fawn. . . reach out. I would be so honored to hold space for you as we navigate a new kind of world together.

Wondering what a BodyMindSpirit Session is about? I am a Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist. I use the modalities of Certified CranioSacral Therapy, Esalen Massage Therapy, Eco-Somatics Practices, Certified Love, Sex, Spirituality Coaching, and DreamTending to co-create a unique session for each client. I assist you in down regulating an activated nervous system, building new relationship to pain, body, sensation, emotion, breath, and trauma story in ways that support you in coming back to inner wisdom, activating the body’s innate healing capacity, and bringing more balance and peace to your life. In short, I support healing through embodiment, empowerment, & expression of true Soulful Self. Here’s a short video explaining a bit about my work.

Poem of the Month

by Maria Popova of The Marginalian

being in balance together
is not a fixed state
not a battle over differences
or bending to each other
but a slender cord
of grace between you
tough and elastic
that leaves you
steady and free

Personal Reflections on Conscious Relationship to Life

Winter in the central valley of California usually means fog. I love it. The fog helps me honor slowness and Mystery. When I have to drive in it, I love that the familiarity on roads I’ve driven a thousand times disappears. It becomes a new world. My brain has to engage differently in the fog. Everything feels intriguing (and sometimes a little terrifying).

You all know by now that reconnecting to seasons and cycles is my thing. I believe we must come back into rhythm with nature’s seasons and cycles to heal, to repair a broken body, family, community, world.

Connection.

Intimate connection.

Building and deepening relationship with the seasons and the cycles. Not biohacking. Not the next fad or highlight in scientific evidence that nature is good for you and the practices indigenous people followed for thousands of years are, shock of all shocks, the best practices for physical, emotional, mental, psychic, community, and spiritual health.

I’m passionate about helping you fall in love with Life, with being a messy human connected to the elements and other in intimate ways because we ARE the elements. This kind of “biomancing,” as my teacher, Dr. Azra Bertrand calls it, is a lifestyle change, consciousness shifting, remembering, reconnecting to harmonious templates that are lying dormant within us and can be awakened through deepening our relationship to the natural world.

I’ve been changing my way of thinking and being slowly over the last decade. I don’t believe in trying to change it all at once. I believe in allowing small changes to shift trajectories in major ways over time. This slowness of my own evolution was not easy for me at first. I am an overachiever. I love to work hard. I love to get shit done. And I love to move (and drive) fast. I love to fall into bed exhausted feeling like I accomplished a million things.

Life has taught me to move fast when it’s time and move slow when it’s time. I learned this through attuning to my menstrual cycle’s energy patterns, attuning my body to the seasons of spring, summer, autumn, winter, and to honoring the sunrise, sunset, moon cycles in personal and intimate ways. I am changing my life, my biology, and my disharmonious templates in slow and beautiful ways.

One of the small habits I finally started this winter after hearing about the benefits for the last few years is wearing orange tinted glasses after the sun goes down. I cannot believe how much I feel the true tiredness in my body when I wear them. I go to bed earlier and get better sleep now that I added this small habit. My mind feels clearer and I wake up feeling more refreshed. More than a biohack, this is a relationship with light and dark that I’m tending to within myself. In the morning, I get up and put my face in the sunlight and my bare feet on the grass. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years, as I’m rebuilding a love and trust of Light energizing me, Earth holding and nourishing me, Water flowing me and Breath breathing me.

The biomancing part of that? This is me learning to soften to and open my bodymindspirit to Life Loving and Resourcing ME in a tangible, embodied way. I don’t just do these practices so I can outlive everyone. No, I’m doing these practices to be in relationship to Life, to Love itself, to the Bigger Thing Resourcing my bodymindspirit that allows me to be ME in the world. The Elements are Divine Love energizing me with the Sun, breathing me with the Breath, flowing me with the Living Water, and holding and resourcing me with the Great Mother Earth Herself. Divine Love holding, resourcing, and loving me every second of my life in this body, no matter how insane the country is or the world gets. Something Bigger, Life Itself, is holding, resourcing, and loving each one of us. And we are desperately needing to tune into the felt sense of this support with our physical, emotional, and mental bodies if we don’t want to crash and burn with all that is shifting around us.

I don’t care what you call that Life Force. Call it God. Call it Goddess. Call it Mother. Call it Source. Call it Life. Call it Mystery. Call it whateverthefuck you want. But when we come back into a intimate relationship with the Bigger Thing Breathing, Flowing, Energizing, Holding and Resourcing us, we find our humanity again. We find our connection again. We begin to feel alive again. We find our compassion for all things again. We have stability even in a wild world and this offers us the opportunity to find our center and be with and support Others through every wild experience we may have individually and collectively.

If you need extra support as you remember and reconnect, please reach out. I am honored and delighted to support you in attuning to the intimate relationship with Life that is available to you with every conscious breath.

This work I’m referring to in this section is melding of my three years of study with Ernest Morrow in his Becoming Human work and three years of study with Dr. Azra Bertrand in his Biomancy Program and pioneering Eco-Somatics work.

Song of the Month

The Way Knows by Lindsey Scott

You don’t have to know the Way
The Way knows the Way

You don’t have to plan the Way
Trust the Way
Feel your Way

The Way knows
The Way knows
The Way knows the Way

My thoughts are cages.
I long to be free.

But do I?
Really?

Read more

Hello Beautiful Humans

In December’s monthly touch in, you’ll find:

• Poem of the Month by Wendell Berry

• Reflections: Into the Longest Night

• Local Healer Highlight: Meet Amanda Roeben

• Last minute gift options (or if you’re like me . . . gifts for January!)

• Emie Kay Coaching Offerings: Are you ready for Real Life?

• Book of the Month: The Unwinding by Jackie Morris

To Know the Dark by Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Into The Longest Night

When the curtain opens into the longest night on December 21st, what will you find on that dark stage?

Can you sit in the darkness, in the silence and wait for your eyes to adjust? There are treasures to locate here. This is a stage waiting to bring you into dreamtime.

Or are you rushing toward the light for fear of what might be hiding behind the curtain on the dark stage? Maybe you’re rushing to the light simply because no one has given you the invitation to stay with the dark.

Can you be curious about your patterns, your fear, your desperation to see more clearly than you currently can?

What if the dark is holding Mysteries you need for the next season?

What if the unfolding in the darkness, the cold of the resting soil is the most important moment to sit with?

What might happen when you make space in the dark?

One of my deepest joys and honor is to hold space for people in process of embodying their soul truth. This journey includes learning to sit with the dark . . . with our dark. Our Western Culture and dominant world religions overly focus on the light/enlightenment/ascension. But there is wisdom in the dark that must not be ignored. If you choose to ignore it, it will eventually pull you under to meet it anyway . . . life leads to death leads to rebirth, repeat. You cannot escape the cycles. Life will continue to take you into the dark. You can continue to resist. Or you can learn to flow in harmony with the light, dark, light cycles and appreciate them all.

Sometimes you need support for your body, mind, and soul to enter into the dark spaces. Sometimes the terror you feel when you think of sitting in the dark alone is too much. You need someone to sit with you to help your nervous system regulate while you meet the dark and all the stories you hold around it.

Sometimes the terror you’ve survived alone in dark seasons is buried in the cellar of your body & soul waiting for release. Sometimes there truly are monsters from your past lurking in the dark ready to be transformed if you have the support and courage to face them.

Maybe you know you need help meeting it in order to alchemize it.

In a Balanced Living session, I help you stay in the present moment with me while meeting old story in body memory, thought memory, or emotional memory. As we journey together, you may have the opportunity to rescue those terrified protective patterns or versions of you frozen in terrible moments of your past or in your fascial patterns.

With the support of Presence and body regulation, you can bring those vulnerable versions of you into present moment awareness to integrate into the love, holding, and support of your loving awareness, gentleness, and safety of today.

Book a Balanced Living Session or reach out for a discovery call if you are interested in this kind of support. CranioSacral Therapy is a beautiful modality to support not only body pain and dysfunction but emotional and mental pain as well. In Balanced Living Sessions we don’t go searching for the monsters. Instead, we create loving, safe enough space to practice resting and being held in love. As we do this, patterns and memory that refuse to relax will surface. And then we simply get curious. No hard work. No forcing. No retruamatizing. Simply holding you in loving awareness and curiosity. It feels like magic.

If “stuck and frozen” are words you frequently use to describe your self, your situations or your body, the support I offer in Balanced Living Sessions may be helpful in unthawing, reconnecting to Nature, and learning to flow again.

If the dark is a scary place for you, here are a few images to play with in reframing the energy around the experience of darkness:

• safe cocoon

• safe, warm womb of growth and preparation

• fertile soil of resting, a necessary phase before spring

• dreamtime for your psyche and soul to receive fresh vision for new growth

If you simply cannot access curiosity around the dark, it may be that old belief systems or buried pain is keeping you from softening into a curiosity with the dark. These would be good indicators that it might be beneficial to find a trusted therapist, bodyworker, or healer that is trained in trauma informed modalities or is capable of truly holding safe enough space for shadow work or depth work or eco-somatic work.

Winter Solstice and/or New Moon Invitation

If you already have the tools and just need a bit of encouragement to dive deeper, here’s my winter solstice invitation.

Let’s do a darkness ritual together.

Slow down. Set a timer for as long as you want to play with this experiment. Turn off the lights and get comfortable in the dark. Not with the Christmas lights on, not with a candle, not with the nightlight in the hall. Be in the dark.

Keep a steady breath. Let your breath move any emotion, sensation or thought that arises in the dark.

Use the practice of naming what you notice. This will give you a bit of distance from the experience. It looks like this:

• Set a timer. This creates the sacred container and will help your brain relax into the experiment.

• Take a few deep breaths and settle into the moment and the dark.

• Name: I notice the racing thoughts.

• Notice if your mind wants to hook on to the racing thoughts and go barreling into the next and the next and the next thought. Interrupt it by naming it again.

• Breathe deep for several cycles.

• Then name something else you notice.

• I notice my chest is tight.

• Practice staying with the thing you have named. Try not to start thinking about what is wrong with your chest, just breathe long deep breaths for several cycles.

• Then name something else you notice.

• Repeat for as long as you’ve set your timer.

• Once the timer goes off, the sacred container has ended.

• Take several more minutes to ground, nourish, journal, do artwork.

• Notice if you have more spaciousness inside yourself after this practice.

I hope you enjoy the dark. If not now, I hope you get a little bit curious about the reasons you might not be enjoying the dark, the trainings you received to embed a fear and skepticism of the dark, and to question any resistance you have to simply be in the dark. There are treasures waiting for you, my friend.

Into the dark. . . .
emie

Wondering what a BodyMindSpirit Session is about? I am a Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist. I use the modalities of Certified CranioSacral Therapy, Esalen Massage Therapy, Eco-Somatics Practices, Certified Love, Sex, Spirituality Coaching, and DreamTending to co-create a unique session for each client. I assist you in down regulating an activated nervous system, building new relationship to pain, body, sensation, emotion, breath, and trauma story in ways that support you in coming back to inner wisdom, activating the body’s innate healing capacity, and bringing more balance and peace to your life. In short, I support healing through embodiment, empowerment, & expression of true Soulful Self. Here’s a short video explaining a bit about my work.

Local Healer Highlight: Amanda Roeben

Amanda Roeben is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, trained Holistic Lifestyle Coach, Mind–Body–Soul therapist, Reiki Master, and the founder of Moonflower Holistic Healing. Her work is rooted in trauma-informed, body-based healing and nervous system regulation, supporting women in reconnecting to their bodies as wise, intuitive, and deeply intelligent spaces.

Her approach integrates somatic therapy, myofascial release, nervous system regulation, parts work, energy healing, and ritual-informed embodiment practices. With a strong clinical foundation and a cyclical, feminine lens, Amanda bridges therapeutic understanding with intuitive, body-led healing. Her work is also informed by ongoing training in holistic pelvic care, reflecting her devotion to supporting the womb space as a site of healing, memory, and feminine wisdom.

Amanda primarily serves women who feel disconnected from their bodies due to chronic stress, burnout, trauma, or major life transitions—such as postpartum, identity shifts, or seasons of profound change. Many of the women she works with are highly sensitive, deeply feeling, and intuitively oriented, yet find themselves living in states of over-functioning or survival. Her work offers a slow, grounded return to safety, self-trust, and embodied presence.

Her teachers and guides include John F. Barnes, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Alberto Villoldo, Tami Lynn Kent, Richard Schwartz, and Peter Levine, alongside living earth-based and devotional influences such as Asha Frost, Mother Earth, Grandmother Moon, and the lineages connected to Mary Magdalene, Isis, and Kali.

Amanda offers 1:1 somatic healing sessions, deep-dive intensives, a body-based healing membership, and sacred group containers designed to support long-term nervous system healing and embodiment. She offers a feminine healing framework centered on remembrance, reconnection, alchemy, and ritual integration.

This work is for women who are ready to slow down, listen to their bodies, and engage in healing as a relational, embodied process. It is for those who desire a more intimate relationship with themselves.

At the heart of Amanda’s work are the beliefs that we are our own best healers and that within each of us lives a sacred wildness that can never be extinguished—and is only waiting to be remembered.

Outside of her formal work, Amanda is a devoted mama to her daughter, Moonflower, and is continually deepening her relationship with the natural world. She is currently apprenticing herself to herbalism and homemade medicine making, and exploring voice, sound, and singing as pathways for expression, regulation, and ancestral connection.

The best way to connect with Amanda and explore her offerings is through her social media. She can be found on Instagram at @amandaroebenlcsw, where she loves connecting with new people.

Handmade Gifts

If you’re like me and not tying yourself to a gift giving frenzy in Dec but instead scatter your giving out throughout the next few months. . . here are some suggestions of people whose products are lovely. I’ve featured them here before.

HONOR SALVE from Laura Green:
This is the salve I use in my Balanced Living Sessions.
Honor Salve link
DISCOUNT CODE: EMIE15

AMY FIGUEROA: Local Artist
Amy has several prints available on Etsy. Check them out.
BookOfMagick

LORENE SILVA:
Lorene is selling handmade shawls that are gorgeous. She has many colors available. The pics below are of only one example. Check out her Facebook page for more details. These are currently being sold for $30 but higher donations are welcome.

KAREN SWAN: Local Artist, Incense Maker, Potions Creator, All around magical being.
She has some homemade kneaded incense. Suggested price $20 (higher donations welcome).
Check out the pics and info on her FB page HERE.

These incenses are meant to be burned on a charcoal disk:

#11 – Sacred Blend (2021)

A deeply grounding, resin-based formula aged to perfection since 2021. Created in ceremony, it carries notes of ancient woods, temple resins, and honeyed wine. Incense comes as 5 petal flowers. Pinch off pieces to burn atop charcoal a little at a time.

#12 – The Moon (2021)

A rare and beloved blend from the same batch year — gentle, complex, and aromatic with the spirit of healing and gratitude woven into every large moon. Pinch off pieces to burn atop charcoal a little at a time.

If you’d like to purchase please message me (Karen Swan) directly 559-737-3887.

Notes on ingredients and usage, plus a slip of mica will be included.

Emie Kay Coaching Offerings: Are you ready for Real Life?

Today is the last New Moon of the year. A time of darkness.

Today Venus and the Moon merge in the sky and we descend through another Chakra gate into the Root [I’m referencing The Rose Path: Inanna’s myth that mirrors the dance of the moon and Venus.] For those of you in my women’s circles or who follow the Rose Path, this is your cue to drop into your root and allow whatever is ready to release here to reveal itself. No hard work. Just notice what is naturally arising from your old stories, origin stories ready to be surrendered in this dark space as we near the gate into the underworld next month.

Sunday is the Winter Solstice. A time of darkness.

We are transitioning from The Year Of The Snake . . . a 9 year for those who like numerology (shedding and releasing and ending) to The Year of The Horse . . . a 1 year (beginnings and movement).

Light is coming. Movement will happen again.

Deep breath.

Sit with me for awhile longer in this dark space of shedding.

I’m personally in it with you. I have some terrifying old stories of abandonment and harrassment currently alchemzing through my body. My nervous system has needed a good bit of extra TLC and affirmation from my closest friends and practitioners.

When I left my marriage and religion over a decade ago, I could not process all the pain and terror of it in the moment. I had to survive. I had to build my business. I had to support my kids. I had to make it work or die trying. And I did it. But now I’m stabilizing in a new way. My nervous system and psyche know that this new level of safety means I can handle going back to hold, honor, love and integrate those terrified, harrassed, sorrowful parts of me I had to stuff away to survive.

If you want a leader, a practitioner, a therapist who keeps their personal journey to themselves so you can imagine them to live in the perfection you are addicted to striving toward . . . you’ve already realized I’m not that person.

I choose my personal sharing intentionally. I choose to reveal aspects of my struggle, my healing journey, my messier versions of myself so you can know that even though I’ve made it “here,” Life continues to spin me around the spiral to allow me to play with and surrender patterns and old stories that are buried or that I’m addicted to that keep me small, voiceless, disempowered, or disembodied.

I am a real human with deep connection to my divine soul essence. If you want asceticism . . . find it in the billion teachers trying to sell you perfection. If you want to learn how to be fully human with access to your divine center. . . I can hold exquisite space for you to learn that. If I’m not your person, locate teachers, healers, practitioners who feel congruent within themselves and resonant with your body not your programmed mind looking for perfection. Locate teachers, practitioners, and healers who model divine essence flowing through messy humanity. Locate teachers and healers who don’t just talk about embodiment and empowerment but those who actually carry the energetic signatures of embodying the truths they teach.

This next season of increasing AI perfection will call for you to be choosing your teachers, your practitioners, and your support team from an embodied sense of alignment, not a perfected website, perfected body, perfected message, perfected course. Now days, anyone can produce that. But not everyone can produce energetic congruence . . . words and energy aligned and embodied. Your body will feel the truth if you slow down and tune in.

This next era will ask you to evaluate your personal goals in light of real vs unreal. Are you still working toward perfection? If so, you will be swept into the world of AI perfection and disembodied ascension. If you want to learn to access your unique soul truth, reconnect to the real rhythms of Life, Death, Rebirth and be embodied, empowered and express your uniqueness in the world . . . you must find REAL people who connected to nature, their wholeness and present moment reality to support you.

This next era will ask you to get super clear or be swept into a disembodied, disconnected striving that will be difficult to disentangle from in a few years.

Please be wise about who you choose to work with. I’m not saying pick me, pick me . . . I’m saying slow down, drop into your body and learn to locate RAW PRESENT MOMENT Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Love from a deeper knowing than the way your mind has been brainwashed and manipulated to “choose.”

All that said, I’m confidently magnetizing those who are ready to work with me (or repel those that are done working with me . . . since the beauty of magnets both attract and repel). I am here to support those who are ready to learn how to be embodied, empowered and express their divine soul essence through their unique human experience into the world.

If you’ve been considering working with me but haven’t reached out for a variety of reasons, sit with the options in the dark of this new moon, the dark of winter solstice, the dark of the venus/moon root gate.

The space I hold is sacred and deep. I am not a light worker. I am one who initiates you into your Wholeness.

Your Wholeness is being at peace with ALL of you, the light and the dark. Your Wholeness is having access to every emotion, not just the easy to feel ones. Your Wholeness is not being enmeshed or addicted to your stories, personality pieces, protective parts, or programming from cultural, familial or religious upbringing. Your Wholeness is having access to the unbroken space of your I AM divine soul essence at a moment’s notice in order to observe body, thought, sensation, emotion, external and internal experience. Your Wholeness is having choice to move in any direction that Life is asking you to move, even if it’s scary or not a generally accepted choice or path. Your Wholeness is choosing your present moment truth over a patterned protective behavior. Your wholeness is allowing the vulnerability of your heart and soul truth to be open to what is instead of callous and guarded against what you expect.

If you want to see yourself more clearly than you’ve ever seen your Self, working with me might be your next step.

If you are tired of hiding from the world, hiding from yourself, hiding from the shadows in your deep, it might be time to enter into an initiation where you will meet it all in sacred space, held by one who has been there a hundred times and returned with greater riches than I could ever explain.

If you are tired of striving for perfection and know there must be another way to Live, you might be ready for my 9 month Womb Wisdom Initiation coaching container or my 9 month True Self Initiation. It is an undoing of your stories. It is a naming of the addictions to mental patterns and origin stories that keep you stuck. It is a divorce from “normal” society and the perfectionistic striving that will only increase in the coming years. It is an end of lying to yourself and the world. You will learn to tell yourself the truth. You will learn to tell the world your truth.

My Emie Kay coaching containers are not for beginners. In Balanced Living Sessions, I will meet you exactly where you are and give so much love and space and honor at the pace your nervous system can handle. In Balanced Living Sessions, I will help you learn skills to begin living in your body in present moment in a way that gives you a greater range of the sense of being alive RIGHT NOW. You will learn to tolerate and even begin enjoying the broad range of emotions, sensations, thoughts, and experiences Life offers you in a human body. You will build new relationship to sensations like pain and tightness. You will learn to be curious about what’s showing up for you in a present moment situation rather than continually reacting out of old protective patterns and habits. You will learn to begin having patience and grace for your process rather than forcing yourself into perfection or impossible standards. You will travel at your own pace in Balanced Living Sessions and have the most nurturing side of my gifting holding your body, your mind, and your soul. Balanced Living sessions prepare you for the deeper initiation work of my Emie Kay Coaching Containers.

If Balanced Living Sessions are working for you and serving you, stay with them. I’m not coercing anyone into an upgrade here. I’m asking you to know your self and what kind of support you need at the stage of your journey you are on.

In the Womb Wisdom Initiation, the True Self Initiation, and the Pussy Power Activation coaching containers, I will not present as a nurturing practitioner or friend. I will be holding the container in the wisdom of the Wild and Wise Woman. I will not annihilate your protections or your mental addictions to your favorite stories or vices or victimizations or your favorite ways of lying to yourself to stay stuck and blaming everyone and everything around you. But I will not coddle you when those pieces show up in the space together. I will lovingly hold space for Truth, for Beauty, for Freedom, for Love, for Present Moment authenticity. And it will be uncomfortable. And you will find your center. You will learn to access the Most Truthful thing about you . . . your I AM divine essence housed in human flesh.

You will know at an embodied layer what this Rumi poem means:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.”

How can I be so bold in this offering? Because over the last four years, every woman that I have held space for their Womb Wisdom/True Self Initiation and Pussy Power Activation is living their REAL life in an embodied, empowered, uniquely expressed way. And those who have journeyed with me for four years in this work with me and Erin Lindsey in our Wild Woman Initiation Containers has become the team that will co-create The Cauldron & The Feast. We are exercising true feminine leadership and feminine creation templates. I have held this vision for community in my heart for 23 years. I have allowed it to take time unfolding and allowed it to die and be reborn and die and be reborn in me a hundred times.

It may not look like anything yet, but it is here. The world will be growing in its need for places where real connected community is led by people who are living from their innate Wholeness through a womb cosmology/feminine template in a world that will be increasingly dis-integrated and disconnected from Soulful Self and Natural Life. Me and my team are at the beginning of building this kind of community together (as are many wise women around the world).

If you feel a draw to my sacred coaching containers or to Balanced Living Sessions or Erin’s and my Wild Woman Initiation Circles that start every September, or to hop on The Cauldron & The Feast, I am honored to work with you. If you feel led to share this offering with someone you think may be ready for my coaching work, I would be grateful for you to pass this newsletter or my info along.

I am ready for this Year of the Horse. I have shed many things over the last year. I continue to shed stories, body memory, and ancient fear of being Me in the world boldly and confidently. It is no small thing to locate and live from your Wholeness. It takes a courage that many will not endeavor to locate within themselves. It takes a desire for Truth, Freedom, Beauty and Love above all else. It takes a reckoning with all the ways you lie to yourself and believe your own stories over the invitation of Life to connect to a Mystery that is calling you forward in the Now.

If you are drawn, reach out for a free discovery call HERE. Book the 15 minute coaching call under Coaching Call for The Cauldron & The Feast. Or fill out THIS FORM and I’ll contact you about a short discovery call.

Is Emie Kay Coaching a gender specific offering?
The Pussy Power Activation Container is a 3 month coaching container that serves anyone who identifies as a woman who has done specific work around their sexuality and orgasmic energy and are ready to use sexual energy for more than a good fuck. You must have an intimate relationship to your orgasm as an individual, you must have a working relationship with energy work, you must have processed your sexuality prior to entering this container with me.

Womb Wisdom Initiation Container is a 9 month coaching container that serves any gender who is willing to center the language and coaching work around the embodiment of the wisdom of Womb Cosmology and Womb/Hara space within the human body.

True Self Initiation Container is a 9 month coaching container for any gender. We will center the work around I AM divine essence language and imagery rather than Womb Cosmology. If you are interested in this offering, reach out to me HERE or book the free 15 min discovery call HERE under the Coaching Call for The Cauldron & The Feast.

I’m sitting with you in the dark. I’m looking forward to continuing our work together into this new year in whatever capacity I am supportive for you on your journey.

Much love and peace in the darkness,
emie kay

Book of the Month: The Unwinding

I was gifted this book by a dear dreaming soul sister. The book has become my night time ritual. Steeping in the dreamy images and lyrical words, calling the beauty of my imagination forward before sleep.

It’s a bit difficult to find where to purchase this book. But it is worth tracking down.

One of my favorite newsletters, The Marginalian, has featured this beautiful book HERE.

Check out Jackie Morris’ website for other books and her beautiful art.

So much love, peace, and courage to you as we enter the longest night.

May we savor these moments in the dreamtime.

May we hold hands when we feel alone.

May we feel the warm, dark womb holding us when we want to get up and rush to the light.

There are gifts for us here,

in the dark.

emie kay

Introduction from November Full Moon Post:

Certain words conjure images, sensation, emotion, reaction within body if we pay attention to those cues.

These conjurings can be unique to upbringing and personal story but tap into much deeper archetypal, ancestral, & historical imprints as well.

I’ve been circling around certain words for a lifetime or four, breaking through their power over me for much of this particular lifetime.

Heathen, Heretic, Witch, Whore.

Four powerful spellings that have haunted me if not only in my DNA imprinting then potentially from past life soul memory as well.

Over the course of the next several full moons, I hope to wind a pathway through the dark forest of my experience with these spellings and their conjurings into a clearing where I stand confidently.

In this clearing, call me whatever you will. . . .

even . . .

and maybe especially. . .

Heathen, Heretic, Witch, Whore.

Ultimately, I AM.

Click HERE to read the full introduction post for Heathen, Heretic, Witch, Whore.

Disclaimer: I will spiral through my ages, stages, perspectives and people within my world over and over through time. The characters of my childhood will build through the months together. No human is one dimensional. No one is all good. No one is all bad. My younger versions of myself did not hold that perspective. You will feel the intense dogmatism in some of the tales. Flow with me through time and you will find the nuance of human and divine.

Part 2: Heathen

The Oxford Languages Dictionary defines “heathen” as a person who does not belong to a widely held religion (especially one who is not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim) as regarded by those who do.

Synonyms of Heathen: Pagan, Infidel, Unbeliever, Non-Believer, Unsaved, Barbarian, Wild, Uncultured, Uncivilized, Primitive, Savage.

Take a moment to contemplate with me. How do these words land for you? Read through the definition and synonyms again and notice your breath, body, and any images that come forward.

Heathen: a person who does not belong to a widely held religion (especially one who is not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim) as regarded by those who do.

Synonyms of Heathen: Pagan, Infidel, Unbeliever, Non-Believer, Unsaved, Barbarian, Wild, Uncultured, Uncivilized, Primitive, Savage.

Most of us have unconscious bias woven into our familial, religious, and cultural contexts. Yours may not be as overt as my stories are, but many raised in Western Civilizations have a foundation of misogynisitic monotheistic belief systems vs heathen/pagan ways of being even if you were not religious or church going growing up.

That matters. The subconscious conditioning matters. Meander through history with your eyes wide open if you aren’t convinced.

I asked several people what “heathen” conjured up for them. I was surprised that many had little reaction, memory, or story connected to the word. A few synonyms sparked story for some, but overall, it was initially an uneventful word for most with a remembered joke here and there about grandma yelling, “Stop acting like heathens.”

This inquiry made me all the more curious about how and why “heathen” felt like a hundred pound bag of stones I was dragging through life until I unpacked it stone by stone and left the empty bag in the recycling bin.

I’m offering you a few stones I unloaded from that heavy bag I discarded.

Warning: If you hold rigid Christian beliefs, you may be offended by this post. If you have unprocessed trauma or are extremely sensitive to references to traumatic stories, you may want to skip my writing altogether. My intention is not to belittle or convert those who hold the religious beliefs I am chucking by the wayside. My intention is not to retraumatize anyone who hasn’t made peace with their own trauma. This particular post is not a graphic telling.

I am sharing experiences that shaped and caged me. These stories illustrate a small portion of what it took for me to find Truth that set me free to Live my life in a female human body with a radiant divine soul essence, embracing all as beautiful and holy. These stories prove why it was necessary for me to descend into my humanity in order to embrace my divinity rather than ascend out of flesh into only spiritual structures that dishonor the human experience.

I am not teaching a theology or history or nervous system regulation course. I am sharing part of my personal story. There is a difference. Please read it as such.

Read more

Hello Beautiful Humans,

In November’s Monthly Touch In You’ll Find:

• Reflections on Surrender

• Poem of the Month: When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

• Celebrations from The Handless Maiden Workshop

• Personal Celebrations & Share

• Song of the Month: Loosen by Aly Halpert

• Transgender Awareness Week

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Reflections on Surrender

What is your favorite way to practice surrendering into change? How do you work with letting go, surrendering, being with what is rather than struggling desperately to try to keep what you think you want or need alive, manipulate it into what you think it needs to look like, or control what is uncontrollable? What practices support your embodied release of tensions, stuck energy, old patterns hanging on, and ending or morphing relationships?

Sometimes when I need to surrender, I sit by a fire to learn from the wood surrendering to the flame.

Sometimes when I resist letting go, I go to a float tank and surrender my body to the dark and the water.

Sometimes when I notice the rigidity in my body or stubborn controlling thought patterns, I set a morning aside for self pleasure. I leisurely allow my senses to awaken to smells, delicious taste, lovely sounds, beauty, and sensual touch. I create and receive pleasure for myself, surrendering into moments of bliss.

Sometimes when I create suffering within myself by holding on to something that is trying to die or alchemize, I set the timer for 15 to 30 minutes and consciously breathe full inhales, full exhales. I practice receiving breath and surrendering breath. I hold the terrified parts of me in loving awareness.

And when nothing works on my own, or I know right away that the thing I can’t open my fist to release needs extra support, I call my therapist, book my bodywork practitioner, set up a session with my coach, or jump on a call with a bestie. These people know better than to try to fix me. They are with me. They hold me. They breathe with me. They allow my body and soul to soften into releases rather than forcing them. I love my people so much.

Humans who are not intimately connected to and flowing with the natural rhythms of life have a habit of resisting change. We have a habit of holding on when it’s clearly time to let go. This is our suffering. When we practice allowing ourselves to be with what is, surrender into the present moment, allow seasons to change, winter to come, and embrace the deaths, peace enters the experience . . . even if the grief feels unbearable. There are skills you can learn that help you move through what you think is unbearable emotion, sensation, thought and experience.

• Practice noticing.

  “I notice this emotion.” “I notice this thought.” “I notice this unbearable sensation or experience.” Notice what your normal behavior would be with this experience or sensation. Running, numbing, masking it with a more powerful feeling emotion? Can you notice that and slow down?

• Breathe into it.

  Be with it and honor the thing you notice with the breath.

• Sound with it.

  Deep breath in and hum, sing, scream, moan. Allow the emotion, sensation, thought to express through sound.

• Move with it.

  How does your body want to move in response to what you notice? Can you allow it? Gently shake, bounce, tap, self massage, walk, dance.

If you need support surrendering into what is, please reach out. If you need support allowing the death, processing grief, or prying your fingers open when you’re unable to let go of what is ready to leave or change, please reach out. It is my deepest honor to support you in the letting go and being with what is.

If you need skillsets to help you live your present moment with more ease, reach out. This is one of my very favorite ways to support people.

As we move through fall, can you surrender into the releases?

Let nature lead you.

“Surrender is surrender to this moment, not to a story through which you interpret this moment and then try to resign yourself to it.” —Eckhart Tolle

Wondering what a BodyMindSpirit Session is about? I am a Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist. I use the modalities of Certified CranioSacral Therapy, Esalen Massage Therapy, Eco-Somatics Practices, Certified Love, Sex, Spirituality Coaching, and DreamTending to co-create a unique session for each client. I assist you in down regulating an activated nervous system, building new relationship to pain, body, sensation, emotion, breath, and trauma story in ways that support you in coming back to inner wisdom, activating the body’s innate healing capacity, and bringing more balance and peace to your life. In short, I support healing through embodiment, empowerment, & expression of true Soulful Self. Here’s a short video explaining a bit about my work.

Poem of the Month: When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

--Mary Oliver

The Handless Maiden Workshop Celebration

Carin Barnes and I held the experimental space for The Handless Maiden to do what she wanted to do with us. We were committed to allowing the feminine templates to lead us through the process. We were committed to allowing the tale itself to do its work within us even while we were preparing the space for others to dive in to find resource and support from this feminine map of fairytale.

We were committed to holding the space for a minimum of three participants and a maximum of 10. The Handless Maiden drew 12 wild women ready to explore the feminine map of initiation into Wholeness and Powerful Womanhood. The experience was above and beyond what Carin and I were hoping for. The feedback was stunning.

Gorgeous setting, delicious food, deep and rich content, vulnerability, intimacy, embodiment, artistic integration, a titch of masculine structure and a whole lotta feminine flow.

Thank you to the 12 wild women whose energy within the container was magical, co-creative, and essential to the making of this wonderful experience.

If you want to explore fairy tale as maps for the wild woman or powerful womanhood, I highly recommend Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Éstes.

If you want to hear the tale read aloud and steep in what images feel alive for you to play with, here is a recording of me reading it.

Personal Celebrations

November held a milestone for me and my Locke Experiment.

My baby turned 18!

Most of you know I have four young adult kiddos, now ages 26, 23, 20, and 18. I homeschooled all of them with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt Community Learning Center for 15 of the 21 years of the homeschool experiment. Ela graduates in May. I devoted my life to these people. I was a stay at home, homeschooling mom until I got divorced and started Balanced Living in 2016. Motherhood is by far the most difficult initiation I’ve ever experienced.

When my kiddos were small, I was drowning. I couldn’t even find a smidgeon of “me” in all the work of mothering. When I got divorced and my kids were adamant they needed to stay at ERCLC, I was a wreck. How could I manage it all?

It’s truly only been within that last couple years that I have relaxed into the whole experiment. That’s a lot of years of anxiety around mothering and educating my kids! I most often felt like I was failing.

I look back and celebrate all those versions of me. I made it. We made it. We’ve worked our asses off in therapy to break toxic generational patterns in our home. We’ve worked our asses off to maintain heart to heart connection and allow queerness to be welcomed and explored in our home. I did the brutal internal work so that internalized homophobia and internalized transphobia in me would not create separation between me and the humans I love more than anyone. I’m so grateful they were patient with me.

We aren’t perfect, but we know how to love each other and repair when we hurt each other. We generally have deep respect and honor of each other with the normal sibling struggle and personality conflicts that come with so many people sharing space.

I no longer feel like I’m failing at motherhood. I no longer look back and beat myself up for all the things I didn’t do better. I have forgiven many, many moments of losing my shit, saying things I wish I would’ve never said, missing moments I wish I could have been more attuned to, parenting from old belief systems that harm instead of heal, and on and on and on. I didn’t have a mother, grandmother or crone holding me through this experiment. But I did have the most amazing friends, homeschool support, therapist, coach and bodyworker.

I celebrate this wild journey of motherhood I’ve been on. I celebrate the incredibly unique, colorful, creative lives of each of my children.

UPDATE ON ASH’S JOB HUNT: Ash Locke was hired at Heavenly Touch in Hanford and will be starting this Friday. Another major celebration for the Locke Experiment. Send Ash love and peace as they start. If you want to support their massage career, book at Heavenly Touch for a massage with Ash Locke to support them.

Song of the Month: Loosen by Aly Halpert

Loosen, loosen baby
You don’t have to carry
The weight of the world
In your muscles and bones
Let go, Let go, Let go

Holy Breath
and Holy Name
Will you ease,
will you ease this pain?

Last week was Transgender Awareness week. As the mother of transgender humans, I beg you to educate yourself. Soften your tightly held beliefs, soften your body, and practice staying curious. Notice how your body tightens and gets defensive with thoughts of people different than you are. This is a fear response. We are trained to be afraid of those who are different. Can you soften? Can you breathe? Can you get curious and interested in what is actually happening for a person who lives their life differently than you do? Transgender people are some of the most amazing people you will ever meet.

I am constantly afraid of hate crimes. I am constantly aware of homophobia and transphobia. I am constantly aware of the safety of my children and other dear friends in the LGBTQ+ community who deserve to feel safe to be themselves in the world.

Please read a book from the opposite belief than you hold. Please listen to the story of a transgender person (there are podcasts everywhere). Please ask questions with an open mind. Please read articles from perspectives other than the ones you’re comfortable with. I know how hard it can be to let go of internalized homophobia and transphobia. I grew up in rural conservative religious Montana. But for the sake of love and honor and safety of beautiful people like my kids, please educate yourself. Notice how terrifying it might feel to entertain a belief you were trained was “wrong.” Let the terror move through your body with your breath and then engage your heart and thinking brain.

And if you need support in the Visalia area, reach out to The Source. It’s an incredible community of people working to educate, create safe spaces, and empower the LGBTQ+ community in the valley.

Connect HERE.

I am so grateful for each one of you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for allowing me to share moments with you. I feel privileged to know and support you. I celebrate you. I honor you.

emie kay

Certain words conjure certain images.

Certain words conjure sensation, emotion, reaction within body if we pay attention to those cues.

These conjurings can be unique to upbringing and personal story but tap into much deeper archetypal, ancestral, & historical imprints as well.

I’ve been circling around certain words for a lifetime or four, breaking through their power over me for much of this particular lifetime.

Heathen, Heretic, Witch, Whore.

Four powerful spellings that have haunted me if not only in my DNA imprinting then in past life soul memory as well.

Over the course of the next several full moons, I hope to wind a pathway through the dark forest of my experience with these spellings and their conjurings into a clearing where I stand confidently.

Read more

Hello Beautiful Humans,

In October’s Monthly Touch In you’ll find:

• In Person Women’s Workshop 11/8/25: Four Spots Left

• Poem of the Month: When I Am Among The Trees by Mary Oliver

• Slowing Down with the Season

• Local Healer Highlight: Certified Massage Therapist, Ash Locke

• Self Paced Course: Build Relationship to Breath

• Birthday Month: Learning to Celebrate

• Song of the Month: Be Who You Are by Trevor Hall

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The Handless Maiden: In Person Workshop on 11/8/25

WHEN: 11/8/25 from 9 am to 4 pm
WHERE: A beautiful, light filled location in Visalia, CA
WHAT: Steeping in Story as medicine & map for your individuation, empowerment, embodiment and soulful expression. Gentle contemplation, conversation, breath work, & simple integration with movement, nature, art.
WITH WHO: Emie Locke & Carin Barnes are your hosts creating space for you. (1 spot left)
WHY: Read Carin’s invitation below

Please join us for this day of story, reflection, and reclamation.

Ever since I first read The Handless Maiden 6 years ago, I was both fascinated and, at times, appalled by its imagery — the severed hands, the multiple wanderings, and the mysterious guidance and aid of magical forces. Beneath that imagery lies a profound map of transformation. Over the years, different aspects of the tale have risen to meet me in times of transition and crisis, often when I least expected them — challenging me, sustaining me, and reminding me that something deeper and wiser is always at work within the soul’s unfolding.

It is both mine and Emie’s hope that The Handless Maiden will become such a story for you — a living repository of meaning that can sustain you in your own seasons of loss, renewal, and reclamation. Together we will explore the Handless Maiden’s journey, through story, discussion, movement, artistic integration and reflection, allowing her archetypal wisdom to take root in our own lived experience.

We look forward to gathering with you in a comfortable and light filled home and to seeing what unfolds when we enter the story together.

With warmth and anticipation,

Carin & Emie

Listen to the Tale here:

Register HERE.
Need a scholarship or sliding scale option? Contact me HERE.

We are excited to share this sacred space with you.

Poem of the Month

When I Am Among The Trees
Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
”and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Slowing Down with the Season

How are you? How is your body feeling these days? What is your mind swirling around? Which emotions are most prevalent for you?

Slow down with me for a moment and touch in to your own experience. . . not the experience of your partner, your kids, your co-workers, your aging parents, your city, your state, your country, your world . . . YOURS.

Take 7 deep breaths with me for a moment. Count five counts in and five counts out. Here we go . . .

Inhale 2, 3, 4, 5
Exhale 2, 3, 4, 5

Inhale 2, 3, 4, 5
Exhale 2, 3, 4, 5

Inhale 2, 3, 4, 5
Exhale 2, 3, 4, 5

Inhale 2, 3, 4, 5
Exhale 2, 3, 4, 5

Inhale 2, 3, 4, 5
Exhale 2, 3, 4, 5

Inhale 2, 3, 4, 5
Exhale 2, 3, 4, 5

Inhale 2, 3, 4, 5
Exhale 2, 3, 4, 5

Now breathe normally. Soften your gaze or close your eyes. What do you notice? What sensations? What emotions?

How are you?

Honor what you notice. No need to try to change it. Just be with it. Hold what you notice as a gift.

You’ve been missing you while you notice everyone else. You’ve been missing you while you join the panic of the world. You’ve been missing you while you caretake the world or dominate the world or try to manipulate and manage your world.

Now that you have your self here for a moment, just hold your self in loving awareness. Keep breathing. Be gentle with your self.

“I see you. I honor you. I can hold space for this emotion, this sensation, this pattern.” Can you allow what you notice to be ok as it is? No need to change it. Watch it. Be with it. Allow it.

Keep breathing. If there’s a wave of intensity, gently rock or get up and dance or shake it through. Hum or make a sound.

Then pause.

I am here. Life is breathing me. No matter how crazy the world, no matter how crazy my life, I am here. Life is breathing me. And I am receiving the gift of Being, the gift of experiencing this insane experience of being human right now.

Can you feel the joy of Being underneath it all?

As we move through fall in the northern hemisphere, allow the slowing. Allow deep breaths. Allow what you notice to be . . . without fighting it, manipulating it, changing it. Hold it in a circle of loving awareness and watch what happens.

If this exercise is too uncomfortable to do on your own, find someone who can hold the space for you so that your body and psyche can trust that you won’t drown in whatever you notice.

It’s one of my greatest honors to hold that space for clients as they learn to hold loving awareness around whatever it is that is actually happening in the present moment.

Still wondering what a BodyMindSpirit Session is about? I am a Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist. I use the modalities of Certified CranioSacral Therapy, Esalen Massage Therapy, Eco-Somatics Practices, Certified Love, Sex, Spirituality Coaching, and DreamTending to co-create a unique session for each client. I assist you in down regulating an activated nervous system, building new relationship to pain, body, sensation, emotion, breath, and trauma story in ways that support you in coming back to inner wisdom, activating the body’s innate healing capacity, and bringing more balance and peace to your life. In short, I support healing through embodiment, empowerment, & expression of true Soulful Self. Here’s a short video explaining a bit about my work.

Local Healer Highlight

Meet Ash Locke, Certified Massage Therapist, healer, artist, philosopher, nature lover, story teller extraordinaire.

Of all my peeps I promote, this might be my most exciting promotion yet. Ash is my third kiddo and has carried the ability to hold space for people in deep process since they were young. Ash has always walked between worlds with ease. The imaginal realm is rich and present for this creative human and they never lost touch with it. Being embodied has been a journey for Ash as well. They blend their gift of connecting therapeutically to both body and the essence of a person. The imaginal serves as wisdom and the breath and body serve as anchor for Ash as they hold safe enough space for their clients in therapeutic massage. Ash creates a space of relaxation and healing for each individual they work with.

Ash graduated from Massage School in June. It takes a good bit of time for all the paperwork to come through for the official California State Certification. The certification landed in our mailbox a couple weeks ago.

Ash has their resume out to several places. Until Ash is hired, they will work for me to continue honing their skill and gaining references for future job opportunities.

Ash will be working out of my office and available these hours:

Sundays from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm
Mondays from 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Wednesdays from 3:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Saturdays from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm

Offering is a 1 hour Therapeutic Swedish Massage for $100.

BOOK HERE: Ash Locke 1 hour Massage through Balanced Living

Payment will be received through cash or Venmo @Emie-Locke or invoice through Balanced Living.

30 Days: Build Relationship To Breath

This offering is a beautiful way to begin slowing down with the season.

• This self paced 30 days: Build Relationship to Breath Course is now available to everyone. If you ONLY want access to the course, it is $55. The link is HERE.

• If you are a wild woman interested in the 30 Days: Build Relationship to Breath AND you would like access to The Cauldron & The Feast, the price is $33. That link is HERE.

• If you are a Wild Woman who wants FREE access to The Cauldron & The Feast but NOT the 30 Day: Build Relationship to Breath Challenge, LINK HERE.

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Join me on this self paced 30 day adventure of deepening your relationship to Breath. We will be creating a sacred space together to practice Breath Awareness and Conscious Breathing practices. You can’t get this wrong. This container is bathed in gentleness and loving awareness. Everything you become aware of about your Soulful Self, your body, your relationship to Breath is held with love and curiosity. Start where you are, deepen with ease.

You’ll receive:

• 31 short, guided breath work videos (go at your own pace)

• 30 written recaps of the daily practices

• Daily invitation to deepen the practices on your own

• Chat support, celebrations, and loving witness from me and anyone else taking this journey as you desire to share parts of your journey in the comments

• Suggested resources to support your continuing relationship to Breath

• (Women who also want access to The Cauldron & The Feast will also have access to several free resources available on the platform.)

30 Day Build Relationship to Breath + The Cauldron & The Feast Access LINK

COURSE ONLY: 30 Day Build Relationship to Breath LINK

How much pleasure do you allow yourself to feel? Can you allow joy and laughter to move through your voice and body unrestrained? Do you measure your laugh, your joy, your orgasm, your pleasure? Do you silence your sneezes, your giggle, your giant sigh of relief, your delight with the delicious bite you just took?

I had to learn to allow pleasure just as much as I had to learn to allow the grief, fear, anger, disgust to move through me. I struggled to celebrate. I struggled to allow joy to move through. I had to learn I am safe enough in the present moment to be expressive (even if that means people are judging). I would rather be living my present moments more fully, experiencing the joy of being alive (no matter if the present moment is joy filled, grief filled, passion filled, rage filled, stillness filled). I want to LIVE. Living means allowing Life Force to move through me instead of metering and managing and stifling and controlling the moments and the expressions.

October is my birthday month. A few years ago I decided to make the whole month an opportunity to practice celebrating the Gift of My Life. This practice changed my dread around my birthday (a story for another time) into a month of celebrating the gift of being me in the world. We also have a tradition in the Locke Experiment that has created meaning and connection for us over the years. Everyone takes a moment to share something they have appreciated about the birthday person from the past year. . . eye contact and all. It never fails to bring tears, laughter, and deep soul connection to everyone in the room.

Feel free to adopt my experiments. You’d be amazed at how many people need to hear how they are celebrated and appreciated and how many of us need to practice celebrating ourselves and receiving gifts of love and attention.

May we all learn to slow down, receive the Love and Gift of our lives with every breath. May you soften and open to more joy, pleasure, beauty, and freedom with every breath. It doesn’t have to be your birthday month to begin practicing.

Much love to all of you!

emie

Song of the Month

Be Who You Are by Trevor Hall and Rising Appalachia

I was born into skin woven from earthen darkness. I am energized by Light.

Read more

Hello Beautiful Humans,

In September’s monthly update you’ll find:

• “Trust The Pain” by Jeff Foster in You Were Never Broken

• Reflections on Building Relationship to Light & Dark

• Song of the Month: Light, Dark, Light by Angie McMahon

• In Person Full Day Workshop Date Change: NOW Nov 8th: Resourced Woman Workshop - Working With The Handless Maiden Tale

• The Cauldron & The Feast and Wild Woman Initiation Circle LAST CALL

• Purchase 30 Days: Build Relationship To Breath Mini Introduction to Breathwork

• Eco-Somatics Training Recap, Locke Experiment moved homes, & Personal Update

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“Trust The Pain” by Jeff Foster from You Were Never Broken

Friend, the ache you feel today
is not a mistake. There is no shame
in what you are going through.

In some distant world
you are being hailed as a warrior-heroine.

Your pain is a holy site, an altar.

Come out of the mind and into the body now.
Send attention deep into the raw sensations
in your belly, chest, throat, head.
Dress today’s wounds with presence.
Breathe into the sadness.
Offer the anger oxygen.
Infuse the fearful one with fearless fascination.

Don’t try to “fix” the burning.
(It’s not yours to fix, it belongs to the ages.)

Don’t try to “get rid” of it.
(The heart does not understand “get rid of.”)

Don’t even try to “transmute” it.
That is not your job.
Your only job is to love what’s here.

And to love your own inability to love
and to have courage, or to have no courage today,
to be as present as you can possibly be,
and not an ounce more.

You are giving brith to new life,
to a precious inner child,
love and pain making something new,
wound as womb.

She is scared, she is raw, she is a little heartbroken,
but she is so alive now, and deserving of love.

The ache in you is the place
where alchemy longs to happen.

Honoring Rhythms of Light and Dark

Our bodies are nature, made of sun, earth, water, breath, star dust. When we are out of sync with the rhythms of earth and sun, we feel the dis-ease and misattunement in our bodies. When we begin to move back into harmonious relationship with the natural rhythms and cycles of nature, specifically with Light and Dark cycles (circadian rhythm), our entire physiology begins to harmonize.

One important Light cycle to honor is the equinoxes. The light we receive during the 10 days surrounding the equinox in spring and fall give vital information to our body as to how to align over the following 6 months.

Here is what Dr. Azra Bertrand says about receiving the potent light during the equinox windows.

“A fundamental understanding of Eco-Somatics is that are bodies are made of Earth and Sunlight. Literally.

Every atom in our body comes from Mother Earth, and all of our energy originally came from the sun, transformed by plants into a form we can use.

But what most people don't know is that the sunlight you "gather" in these 2 weeks around Equinox programs your biology for the next 6 months.

What does that look like?

Refines your metabolism - what you burn vs what you store

Boosts your immune system, fighting viruses and cancers

Balances hormones and neurotransmitters

Improves your focus, your energy, your mood

Deepens your sense of belonging and spiritual connection to the eco-systems

Scientists call the 2 weeks around Equinox a "critical photoperiod". The light you’re receiving right now reprograms your biology; it modifies 90% of your genes, and sets the biological clocks in every cell in your body.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg ... it also reconnects you to organic time and the cycles of Life.” - Dr. Azra Bertrand

We are just past the equinox window. Spend a few minutes barefoot outside in the morning breathing 3 breaths of Light into your mind, 3 breaths of Light into your heart, 3 breaths of Light into your womb/low belly, and 3 breaths of Light into your root.

Soften and receive the gift of Light. Soften and receive the gift of Breath. Soften and receive the gift of earth nourishing and holding you. Soften and receive the gift of water flowing in you. Learn to dance with the music of the Cosmos.

This practice can continue throughout the year, attuning your body and its beautiful innate wisdom to the natural rhythms of earth and sun.

If you need support finding greater harmony and balance in your BodyMindSpirit and/or building better relationship to the nature of you and the rhythms of Nature, it is my deepest joy to hold sacred space with you in BodyMindSpirit Sessions with Balanced Living, in person or on zoom.

Still wondering what a BodyMindSpirit Session is about? I am a Trauma Informed BodyMindSpirit Therapist. I use the modalities of Certified CranioSacral Therapy, Esalen Massage Therapy, Eco-Somatics Practices, Certified Love, Sex, Spirituality Coaching, and DreamTending to co-create a unique session for each client. I assist you in down regulating an activated nervous system, building new relationship to pain, body, sensation, emotion, breath, and trauma story in ways that support you in coming back to inner wisdom, activating the body’s innate healing capacity, and bringing more balance and peace to your life. In short, I support healing through embodiment, empowerment, & expression of true Soulful Self. Here’s a short video explaining a bit about my work.

Song of the Month: Light Dark Light by Angie McMahon

I love songs that are repetitive and catchy. They become meditations for me throughout my days, bringing me back to truths I’m contemplating, integrating, embodying. This is one that our Wild Woman Circles is focusing on this month.

Trust the cycles.

light dark light by Angie McMahon & Fred Again

LYRICS:
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again

Time is supposed to run out, time is supposed to
Sun is supposed to go down, sun is supposed to
Like your mood, like your power, like your battery
Rise, fall, rise, life, death, life again
Sky, ground, sky, day, night, day again
Rise, fall, rise, life, death, life again
Sky, ground, sky, light, dark, light again
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again

Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again (Time to release every breath I held in)
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again (Loosen my limbs, I can dance now, I’m dancing)
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again (Time to release every breath I held in)
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again (Loosen my limbs, I can dance now)
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again (Dance with nothing to prove, dance now, dance)

Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again (Woo)
Light, dark, light again, light, dark, light again
Light, dark, light again, life gets light again
Life gets light again

Resourced Woman Workshop - In Person: NOTE CHANGES

• DATE CHANGE: NOW Saturday, November 8th from 9 am to 4 pm

• WORKSHOP FOCUS: Working with the map of The Handless Maiden Fairytale to support your individuated embodiment, empowerment, and soulful expression in the world

• LOCATION: Visalia, CA. We will give the exact location address upon registration. We have a cozy, spacious spot in town that will support our process

• 9 spots left for this workshop

• $300: Register HERE. Light breakfast and light lunch included

• Hosts: Emie Locke, Carin Barnes, & Amy Figueroa

So much of a woman’s training over the centuries has been devoid of feminine maps of individuation into our own resourced Self. Why? Because if a woman is in her individuated Self, her power, her inner resourcing, she will not be in blind service to systems that dishonor the feminine templates, communities that actually care for one another, and healthier ways of living as a cyclical Being.

Carin Barnes LMFT, Amy Figueroa , and I are passionate about helping women dust off the ancient feminine templates and maps available to guide women into their unique inner Resourcing and Individuation in order to come back into easeful union and co-creation with Life and Others.

Fairytale and myth are some of the most powerful maps we have. They hold ancient symbols, images, energy, and archetypes that are embedded in the collective psyche and thus within our own. These stories give us templates to follow as we escape from systems and our own developmental traps that keep us playing small and victimized.

As I was individuating, embodying my empowered Self, and breaking free from ancestral, religious, and familial cages within my own psyche and behaviors, one of the most powerful books I read was called, “Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.” In this work, Clarissa Pinkola Estés moves through several myths and stories outlining maps for women remembering their wildness.

I have always loved storytelling and fairy tale, but from this reading forward, I knew that the feminine maps were important and my upbringing was largely devoid of feminine myth and maps to light my way.

Carin, Amy and I plan to offer a series of in-person workshops over the next months. Each workshop will have a different fairytale we will be working with. These fairytales will help us locate ourselves within the myth and locate ourselves within our own personal unfolding and becoming. We will be locating the resources available within the story and within ourselves. We will be tapping into embodied knowing of some of the symbolism and maps available to us as women navigating a new/ancient way of remembering and becoming our Individuated Resourced Selves in a wild world that’s waiting for women to remember.

Join us for our first experiment as we steep in the fairytale of The Handless Maiden. We will have embodiment and breath work practices to support what we discover inside of ourselves. We will complete the journey with an art journaling integration period for the last 2 hours of the day with Amy as our guide.

The space we will be in is spacious and beautiful. A small snack breakfast and light lunch is included.

Reach out if you have questions. Be on the lookout for more refined info.

If you know you want to be part of this experience with us, register HERE. There are 9 spots left.

Wild Woman Circle/The Cauldron & The Feast

Last call for the 2025/2026 Wild Woman Initiation and Wild Woman Continuing Circle Registration. If you feel the pull to join us, please reach out. The doors close for this 9 month cycle on Saturday, October 4th.

We meet from September through May of 2026. Free Discovery Call Recording Link is HERE. This will disappear on Oct 4th.

If you decide to jump in, you will receive the recordings for the September meetings and all written information we have worked with so far. It would not be difficult to jump in and integrate into the community at this point. Our focus is about KNOWING YOURSELF. The focus is not about building relationship with each other, though that will happen.

REGISTER HERE FOR NEW WILD WOMEN

REGISTER HERE FOR RETURNING WILD WOMEN

Maybe you’re not interested in Wild Woman Circle but
. . . . you are interested in perusing the free content of The Cauldron & The Feast. Here is the link for FREE ACCESS to the Cauldron Community.

In a few months, this free access space will have a small entry fee. If you are curious about the community, now is the time to get free access. I have a team of 9 amazing Guides of The Cauldron & The Feast who will be curating the space over the next few months/years. We are taking our time with it’s growth and evolution. I will be introducing each guide here in my newsletter over the next several months.

Erin Lindsey is my first introduction. She is familiar for those of you who’ve worked with me for awhile. Erin is an intuitive astrologer, high priestess, oracle, lover of Life and one of my closest friends for almost 15 years.

We have journeyed through depths and heights together; through losses, joys, co-creations and the life, death, rebirth cycles again and again. Our love for each other and the work we do together is palpable. Erin is the co-founder/leader of The Wild Woman Initiation and Continuing Circles. For a description of her self and work, visit her website HERE.

She is having her first baby any day and will be on maternity leave for the next few months. Once she returns to her readings, I will post her website here again. If you are drawn to work with Erin, your time will be encouraging and affirming of your soul’s path.

Erin’s input in The Cauldron & The Feast is and will continue to be beautiful. She currently has a free 3 part video series called, “Becoming a Relaxed Woman” available upon entry to The Cauldron & The Feast. She is selling a recorded workshop called, “Black Moon Lilith Workshop” for $49.00.

This is her Black Moon Lilith Workshop description:

What is your relationship to Wildness?

Do you have access to the innate Wildness inside of you? Or do you struggle to find it...as though it has been buried for so long you hardly know where to start digging?

Connecting with Black Moon Lilith & Her Mythos is a key in unlocking your Innate Wildness. Her story gets us in touch with the repressed & exiled parts of our feminity & all of the ways it has been shut down or cut off from us in our day to day lives. Black Moon Lilith is a medicine for these times. The Goddess is rising again... Unapologetic, Bold, Wild, Free. She is Rising through YOU as the living breathing Myth.

I am thrilled to announce the beginning of a series of workshops called, “Goddess in the Skies”, with Black Moon Lilith as our starting point.

In this Workshop we will play with 3 layers together...

1. Herstory: The Myth of Black Moon Lilith. We will explore the Sumerian & Hebraic versions of Her Mythos, Her Symbols, Her Sounds, Her Source.

2. Her Present Moment Living Myth: The 3 stages we experience as we touch Her energy inside ourselves...1) Rebellion 2) Exile 3) Redemption. The Journey of ReWilding.

3. A Journey to Meet Her for Yourself. I will lead us on a guided journey to connect directly with Black Moon Lilith. As a gift for registering you will also receive a PDF of Black Moon Lilith through the Zodiac Signs & Houses as a tool to help you connect with Her via your Natal Chart.

30 Days: Build Relationship To Breath

• This self paced 30 days: Build Relationship to Breath Course is now available to everyone. If you ONLY want access to the course, it is $55. The link is HERE.

• If you are a wild woman interested in the 30 Days: Build Relationship to Breath AND you would like access to The Cauldron & The Feast, the price is $33. That link is HERE.

• If you are a Wild Woman who wants FREE access to The Cauldron & The Feast but NOT the 30 Day: Build Relationship to Breath Challenge, LINK HERE.

Join me on this self paced 30 day adventure of deepening your relationship to Breath. We will be creating a sacred space together to practice Breath Awareness and Conscious Breathing practices. You can’t get this wrong. This container is bathed in gentleness and loving awareness. Everything you become aware of about your Soulful Self, your body, your relationship to Breath is held with love and curiosity. Start where you are, deepen with ease.

You’ll receive:

• 31 short, guided breath work videos (go at your own pace)

• 30 written recaps of the daily practices

• Daily invitation to deepen the practices on your own

• Chat support, celebrations, and loving witness from me and anyone else taking this journey as you desire to share parts of your journey in the comments

• Suggested resources to support your continuing relationship to Breath

• (Women who also want access to The Cauldron & The Feast will also have access to several free resources available on the platform.)

30 Day Build Relationship to Breath + The Cauldron & The Feast Access LINK

COURSE ONLY: 30 Day Build Relationship to Breath LINK

Personal Share: Eco-Somatics Training, Locke Experiment Moves, Settling into Spaciousness

Eco-Somatics Training Retreat

A small group of us came together from all over the world to practice what we have been learning together online over the last 3 years. The energy seeded the next wave of awakening, remembering, and reintegrating our bodymindspirits back into the natural rhythms of Earth, Sun, Water, Breath, and Womb Cosmology for health, wholeness, and evolution. One of the greatest gifts for me was being at the retreat with my long time friend, Ginny Connell (also a guide of The Cauldron & The Feast). We are excited to co-create offerings for you with this material.

We had powerful ceremonies with Ix Cacao, Madame Mugwort, Lady Nicotina. We baptized ourselves in the cold waters of the Mother Mountains of the Appalachians. We communed with ancient speaking stones and wise old trees. We embodied our eco-ancestors and felt their energy imprints within our own DNA awaken. We played with primordial movement of the fluid wave of Life Itself coursing through us, as us.

We cried, laughed, howled, connected to Source within, released, received, rebirthed. We honored the fractured human templates we were born into and called forth the ancient templates of harmony, wholeness, and organic time within our flesh & bones & blood.

I didn’t experience any one thing different than I have experienced at other moments of my own practice or at other embodiment retreats or sacred ceremony. And yet, the consciousness, depth and wholeness with which Dr. Azra and Seren hold space awakens the vibration and seeding of dragon energy that is beyond what any one person can touch alone. They hold the most expansive evolutionary container I have ever experienced.

I am honored to have participated in this pioneering retreat with the Bertrands and my dear friend, Ginny. The work will continue to reverberate through my personal and professional offerings for the rest of my life.

Locke Experiment Moved

I returned home from the Eco-Somatics retreat late Saturday, Aug 23rd to stacks of boxes in our living room. While I was gone, two of my amazing kiddos got to work in preparation for our move to a new home in the Visalia area.

As we sat amidst the boxes that evening, my kids and I laughed, cried, remembered who we were 8 years ago and celebrated who we have become. We allowed ourselves to feel the agitation of the contractions squeezing us out of our little space that held us as we healed and grew. Thank you, Roomie (the name of our little house).

I planned to stay in this house until my kids launched. Life had other plans. Now is the rebirth into a new season of thriving and spaciousness.

We had a team of 18 people moving us from our 1030 sq ft home into our beautiful, spacious 2700 sq ft home! There was so much love and outpouring for us through this move. The love and goodness and help is actually overwhelming for me to receive. It is taking us quite a bit of time to settle in and allow ourselves to assimilate it all.

THANK YOU to all who helped and to all who said they were available to help. Thank you to our soul friends who are allowing us to rent this beautiful home. Thank you to Life for squeezing us through the birth canal into the spaciousness of this new season.

Before my divorce, I lived into and often taught about learning to thrive after a lifetime of surviving. Long standing familial templates and my own childhood abuse and dysfunction set strong patterns of survival within me. I worked super hard from about 2008 to 2015 to heal body, mind, spirit even while enduring a toxic marriage.

Then I had a severe car accident. Months in bed gave me time to get crystal clear on how much staying small I was still doing by hiding my true self, keeping my marriage afloat.

So I got divorced.

I wanted to thrive in more honest and expansive ways. I wanted to give my kids a different opportunity to thrive as their truest expressions of self. (Which, BTW, is scary as hell and maybe the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.)

The many aspects of death that came with divorce sent me back into survival and healing mode (spiral life. . . meeting the themes at another level). I was supporting four kids virtually alone. I chose to be an entrepreneur, determined that it would work because there was no way in hell I was working for someone else. I had the faith, vision and skillsets to survive. I was doing deep inner work to alchemize abusive family templates amidst everything else. I was holding brilliant space, along with our family therapist, for my kids to work through the divorce and toxic family patterns they had grown up with.

I would come to a place of thriving once again. I knew it in my bones.

Working hard, striving, and surviving is a more familiar pattern than resting, receiving, thriving and co-creating with Life. It stands to reason that Life would have to kick me out of my striving spaces to help me realize it is time to rest, receive and thrive at this ten year mark of my divorce and ten year anniversary of Balanced Living.

The timing of the Eco-Somatics retreat was a perfect segue into my next season, retraining my nervous system to believe I’m safe enough to live into ancient/new templates of wholeness, harmony, and thriving. The Eco-Ancestors are within me as ancient information and support.

As I sit in our beautiful back yard every morning, I have to consciously give my nervous system permission to slow down and receive the gift of beauty. Long breaths of sunlight into my mind, into my heart, into my womb, into my root. I’m spending whole mornings laying in the grass, soaking in the sun’s loving energy, giving my roots time to deepen, and communing with the elements.

I allow feelings of unworthiness, shame, guilt, fear to arise from my familial template within and then I move, breathe, sound them through my body and reground. I’m allowing myself time to feel held by earth, breathed by breath, energized by sunlight, cleansed and flowing with water as the cosmos keeps dancing me. I am communing with my aquatic ancestors, the Great Mother, Tiger DNA, Dragon codes, and Mother Tree/Mycelial Wisdom templates within. I want these new patterns to be embodied knowing.

At this present moment, I’m safe enough to rest and thrive.

The practices I share with you make a difference in my life, my peace, my embodiment, empowerment, soulful expressions, and the way I surrender and co-create with Life. These practices help dissolve fractured lineage templates and allow me to repattern and individuate into the more harmonious evoluationary templates to co-create with Earth, Sun, Water, Breath, Cosmic Womb.

It is the Spiraling Life.

May you feel yourself Held by Earth,
Breathed by Spirit,
Energized by Sun,
Flowing with Water,
Danced by Cosmos.

Cheers to Light Dark Light Again,
emie