There is also deep Chasidic wisdom about the husks, the klippoth, the coverings or shells of the elements that encase and enforce our relative selves, also dissolving - not at the moment of death, but throughout this month of Elul. The work we do in Elul is a chance to reveal the Infinity that dwells beneath and throughout the outer layers that we so readily mistake for ourselves. I just heard a whisper of this teaching a week or so ago, and immediately felt the wisdom rhyme deep within my body. Stripping away the klippoth, harvesting and then shucking the husks from our own bodies and, likewise, our stories? Well, that makes this month of Elul like a slow dying process, too. An annual rehearsal, in a sense, for that inevitable moment that will one day come without warning. A reenactment to be embodied and refined, year after year, as we both fear and learn not to fear, death.

Meanwhile, I’m still emerging from last weekend’s ceremony and I do not yet have words. Words, at present, seem both inadequate and meaningless to even try and handle, whether I wield them abstractly, out of mere curiosity, or with any real focus, intent or purpose to convey ideas. For I also do not yet have many ideas. I am suspended in time and space. Disassembled and delightfully surprised.

Mere days ago now, Saturday last, I was steeped for hours in a place beyond all intelligibility. The best I can do is to say that I experienced the merest brush with Great Mystery. A fleeting - but seemingly endless - encounter with a reality entirely beyond concept or context. It was humbling, to be plunged so completely into a realm which, after all the ground I’ve covered until now, I had never even imagined existing.

I struggle to assign language to this, to somehow land an understanding - not for you, dear reader, but even simply for myself. For what strikes me most about this encounter, in which no ordinary conception of self even remained, was that it was both boggling in its difficulty, and yet reassuring in its lack of suffering. It was very hard work, yet without much concern for the hardship. Deep unknowing, yet held in openness, without fear. Without my usual hallmarks of self-pity or self-doubt. Without any particular concern for self at all. I felt like the weakest link, yet was also perfectly amenable to that state, that station. How liberating. There was nothing to do but be, and keep walking. It was a whole new flavor and cadence of Divine Love. Insistent, forceful, benevolent, humorous, safe.

I prayed. I walked. I sang. I breathed in the sunlight. I did all of these things for hours upon hours. First I dismantled my habits of comparison and fear, and then I experienced a state so far beyond any that I had met before, that even the work of dismantling itself became irrelevant. Unintelligible love, how else can I call it, but Great Mystery? And it turned out, it was safe - to dwell in the mystery. It was safe, to give myself over to the Unknown. To drop my need to know. To drop my need for orientation and clear bearings. To embrace the free-fall and flood of infinity.

There is a plummeting feeling that I so often wake up with in the mornings. A flooding, an overwhelm, an urgent panic. And nearly as often as it occurs, I subtly determine that it is “bad,” a sign of something dangerous lurking within me. But what if it’s not bad? What if that’s just the feeling of being alive? I asked myself this when the feeling surfaced again this Monday morning. What if real life IS a free fall, and yet, there’s no ground, no bottom to hit, no me to hit bottom, and the whole thing is just infinitely beyond being harmed or harming? Because ultimately, emptiness cannot hurt emptiness, and that is unsurpassable protection.

Yes, there are (more relative forms of) protectors all around me. Elemental allies, spirit guides, well ancestors. Angels, bodhisattvas, Elohim, Shekhina - all the feminine and masculine and theminine faces of the Divine, protecting me. Shepherding me. Guiding me. But at a deeper level, there is not even a ‘me’ to be protected. What. A. Relief. This, perhaps, is what I tasted on Saturday. Though really, I may never know. Even when I meet this bittersweet medicine again, I may never know. Knowing is overrated. Not knowing will set me free.

I do believe my work now is in the watching: to try and spot the signs, notice the signals, the changes in my lived experience that might illuminate for me more precisely what has changed. But honestly, understanding what happened is not the point. Presenting myself - over and over - to the Mystery is. This weekend I was thanked for my persistence. For never giving up on myself. For dedicating my life to waking up, instead. For choosing this particular path of obstacles and blessings as my own unique way of being of service to the world. I take the deaths of my two parents and all that accompanied them as an empowerment, an initiation, and I move forward with grace into the Unknown, grateful for all the more miracles to come that I cannot yet imagine, and may never comprehend.

As the month of Elul continues to unfold, I pray that I will continue to shed all the layers of my knowing. That I continue to uncover myself until I stand, naked, unhusked before the Great Mystery. Surrendering to divine magic that I may never fully understand. For there is so much more power in embracing mystery than certainty. Certainty? That’s dangerous. Certainty breeds fanaticism, fundamentalism. An idea that there is “a way things are,” or should be. Certainty, as such, shuts possibility down. In not needing to know, I find a path to liberation. To making liberatory meaning. To opening new doors.

Yes, my work is to constantly expand the circumference of my own unknown. This, in essence, is also at the heart of Step Two, a step which I am working over again right now. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. On the surface, Step Two looks to be about sanity and restoration. Big concepts, both, well worth diving into deeper, another time. It looks to be about coming to believe, too. About faith, and perhaps, clarity. But the crux for me this time around is actually in what’s hidden within that simple ‘coming to.’ Which is to say, the not-knowing. For I cannot come to believe something new without first acknowledging the limits of my existing beliefs. I cannot create a new way of seeing and being, without letting die off the old way. Elul is a month of dying. May my limited concepts all fall away. Calling my beliefs into question, admitting there is a limit to my extant ways of knowing, only then might I destroy the house of my limiting concepts and in the freedom of the mystery, therein seek my true home…

(cover image from Father. Mother. God.)

It’s Elul now, the last month of the Hebrew year. Hebrew months, like their Tibetan cousins, always start with a new moon. This year Elul rolled in with the auspicious blessings of a full solar eclipse and the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. When I woke that night to pee, I went and laid on the ground outside to watch the drama flashing in the sky and listen to the foxes scream. Haunting, visceral, otherworldly, they are an uncanny stand-in for my daily dose of Elul shofar listening. They cut right through ordinary thought with their piercing cries.

In Hebrew time, each month has its own characteristics. A temporal sentience and rhythm exists that serves to guide the soul on an ever-spiraling journey that travels at once both forward and back through the years. I can lose track of this in the day-to-day, but more and more, I try to bear the tenor of each month in mind. Especially as my own inner landscape has been so disorienting lately, the more sacred and embodied way-finding devices I have to re-orient myself, the better.

Last Friday evening, some fellows and I were speaking about our kavanah (intention) for Elul, and I shared that my goal of the moment is to contextualize all the transitions, losses and transformations in my life this year within the larger framework of my soul’s journey home. To really harness the sacred power of this moment in the Jewish calendar and make this month work for me, so I can enter the new year clear and ready. This, admittedly, is not a thing I will complete in a month. It is more like a lifetime of work. And so I enter the month knowing full well that I may not finish what I now begin, but, to paraphrase Pirkei Avot, neither will I abandon the task. At least, I can get it started, as we take yet another turn around the widening gyre. I didn’t say it this way then, but essentially, it’s about understanding the relationship between destruction and creation. How you can’t have one without the other. How every creation involves destroying something first, even if what’s destroyed is the limiting concept of what’s possible. I’ll come back to this.

The other thing I want to do is simply to act, speak and write within the context of it being Elul the entire month. Elul means we’re in the season of turning and returning, the season of t’shuvah. T’shuvah is often translated as repenting, but these days, repenting rhymes in my head pretty hard with reparenting. It’s about caring for myself in the ways that will set me up best and most powerfully, to live on, congruent and aligned. It’s about tuning into the truest version of my self, and taking action coming from love. Can I do that all month? Can I keep my focus there, on what’s kind, and necessary, and true? It’s worth a try. It’s worth a lot of tries.

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The way I see it now, by the time we reach Elul, we’re in the pocket of the year. We’re cruising through the final stretch of the voyage with a tailwind to carry us. We’re in the countdown to the High Holy Days, the Days of Awe, and all the celebratory and solemn pageantry that ensues from here til Sukkot, and so we may as well power down those electronic devices and enjoy a moment or two of taking stock and tuning in before we come in for that sweet landing.

But why not trade metaphors completely. If we were birds on the wing, then Elul would be where we catch the updraft for our seasonal migration, kettling around and around in a momentous rising spiral - turning, turning - until we rise high enough that we finally reach the jet streams that will carry us home. From that perspective, so high above the Earth, sailing clear, it’s only natural that Elul is a moment for life review.

There’s nothing compunctual about this for me. Not having been raised Jewish (thanks Mom?!), I don’t really have any relationship to doing ‘Jewish things’ out of any sense of obligation or tradition or guilt. I’m here for the mysticism. I’m here for the liberation. I’m here for weaving sacred community, creating authentically relevant and living meaning and experience and momentum together. I’m here for using all the parts - harnessing the richest aspects of every single tradition I have ties to, and then braiding them all together into a synergized, syncretic, transdimensional, radically traditional and radically alive and radically relevant, whole. I’m here for the Great Waking Up. And I’m here to find and articulate and create possibilities that serve all of us, Jewish or not, because I believe that there’s wisdom and blessings here for us all.

To that end, davka (that is, specifically), one of the things I want to do this month is say out loud here some of the more subtle things that I might notice or think exactly when I’m not writing a blog post. Things that would otherwise fall by the wayside of observance and harvesting. Things I might name in passing in my journal before bed at night, or in a day’s final video check-in to a fellow traveler on the path, but that don’t normally ping on my consciousness quite loud enough to land here.

For instance, I noticed Friday night that a pendulum swing had occurred. During and after Shabbat, my mood had shifted, my outlook had changed. Someone remarked at how much joy I was bringing to the space, and I replied, “first time all week!”

Point being, a swing from curmudgeonly bodhisattva to calm-and-content is a much more stable swing than curmudgeonly bodhisattva to manic-and-reckless-obsession-and-overconfidence. So as disconcerting as my mood swings and accompanying perceptual shifts have been, what I’m noting is: the “opposites” aren’t exactly opposites anymore. The opposite of begrudging-and-disoriented-willingness-to-stay-alive is actually now a stable place. A resting place. So it’s more like there’s a swing out, and back, from a place of stillness. Not just a swing to one extreme and then the other. This is a change worth noticing. Because while the contrast is still jarring, the resting place is, well, more restful. There’s more equanimity there. This means the even-keeled moments are multiplying. And I’m down-regulating enough to have certain moments that are downright spacious and relaxed. It might take me a few weeks longer than I want it to, but I’m getting around, this summer, to some of the things that are just plain restorative to do. Going to the river with a book and then napping under a tree. Taking out my friend’s kayak before sunset. Joining a walking meditation group on a new trail on Sunday morning, stepping slowly, barefoot, along the quiet canal. It’s subtle, it’s hard to catch, but I think it’s safe to say that my baseline home territory is slowly starting to include some more trustworthy phenomenological stomping grounds.

I welcome this. It’s nice to consider that Elul just might not be a fire swamp of a month. That respite might actually be a natural part of this homecoming. That I can pursue my kavanah fiercely yet loosely, without beating myself up. That I can enjoy the ride.

And then there’s this other idea that’s been percolating in me the last few days. I was reflecting on the past three weeks or so, back to Tisha B’Av in late July. Tisha B’Av, the ninth of Av, is traditionally the saddest day in the Jewish year, commemorating the destruction of not one, but both Temples, in Jerusalem. This year, it came just days away from my mother’s fourth yahrzeit, so it was, for me, an extra sad day. And things have been fairly emotionally fraught for me since then, as readers will know.

So this got me zooming out a bit, trying to contextualize this cycle in more useful ways. This mourning window, which starts even before the ninth of Av and the destruction of the temples, came with a grief hangover for me this year that lasted right up into the first days of Elul. And now Elul brings this redemptive period of self-reflection and inventorying. Turning and returning. The brokenness preceding the repair, of course.

(image from Episode 4 of Father. Mother. God.)

And then it occurred to me. What if we look at Tisha B’Av as a creation story? What if it’s actually the - a - beginning? There are a lot of new years in the Jewish calendar. What if Tisha B’Av is secretly one of them, too? The mystical Jewish creation story of Kabbalah speaks of brokenness in the beginning. The story goes that God, the divine, infinite All-That-Is - or All-That-Isn’t, rather, because potentiality itself is far beyond what is or isn’t, is it not? And I am, tukje che, Rinpoche, a devotee of emptiness just as much as I am a devotee of the Divine in more, shall we say, imaginable forms - however we call it, the absolute nature of reality, being undifferentiated, couldn’t know itself. God couldn’t meet God-self. Couldn’t have an experience of interaction or union with an “other” that was not. And so absolute reality withdrew itself from a space, and opened up a void to share itself back into, in new form. But then that black hole that was opened up, that absence, that empty-of-emptiness-space, it just shattered when it met the Light. It crystallized and broke apart. And those infinite shards of shattered emptiness are the broken vessels that we all are now. That we’re all now trying to heal. Tikkun olam - to repair the world. It’s repairing these original wounds, the wounds of creation, the wounds of being made. So the creation story is a destruction story. Which leads me to ask, what if this whole destruction story is a creation myth in disguise?

What if Tisha B’Av is not ultimately about the Romans or the Babylonians destroying the Hebrew temples at all? What if Tisha B’Av is the great, mystical Kabbalistic creation story? What if the temple burning is, in fact, the moment of the Divine fully entering into us, and we just can’t take the greatness, and we are all set alight, and our walls come tumbling down, and all the cracks in our small selves are exposed and on fire? And then what if we realize that, and as the fire dies down, in the rubble of what remains, we start to piece things back together? We recognize that it’s worthwhile to try again, dangerous as it seems. We want to present ourselves once again before the Divine, and cry out “fill me, pour yourself into me, have your way with me…”

And what if we have these next seven weeks to do all the rectifying and inventorying and repairing that we can, to contextualize the whole glorious mess of our lives as “God, I couldn’t handle the greatness of you, the greatness of me, of us, of our I-thou moment. And I broke apart, I crumbled, my walls fell down, and since then, I’ve been here, wandering, exiled in an illusion of separation. But you know what? I think we should try again, this whole divine union thing. Please, give me another chance.” And so, ever a fool for God, we spend Elul piecing ourselves back together to approach the Divine once again. To assert our willingness to begin all over again. To face judgment, to be inscribed in the book of either death or life. To begin a new year. To assume a new face - a true face.

By the time this post goes live, I will be emerging from a window of ceremony that I haven’t yet begun. It’s fitting, to be entering ceremonial space knowingly in this month of Elul. I approach it as an empowerment, a homecoming, but also, as a reckoning. An honest appraisal of where I am. A space to ask, ‘what’s possible, that I haven’t even considered yet?’ More than the question of where I’d like to get to in my life next year, I hold the question - where is it my sacred responsibility to get to? How much waking up am I prepared for? How much waking up, being filled, being emptied out, being refilled, can I handle? How transcendent can my relationship to existence become? Can I transcend the ego, the identification with my small self, my body, my history, my name(s)? Can I inhabit this physical form, be informed by all the somatic wisdom of this body, with enough spaciousness that I can yet experience the light coming through all my cracks? Can the destruction of the temple actually be the destruction of my grasping at small self, at small story? Can I sustain a generative, balanced existence in a post-temple world, where the emptiness inside the Holy of Holies has merged with the emptiness outside, and all is chaos and void, and yet out of this, let there be light? Can I create anew, in a place beyond the crumbling of the temple? The smashing of the vase, to jump spiritual metaphors entirely and welcome in Tibetan Buddhism’s wisdom - can mother and child clear light, already acquainted, reunite? In me, as me, through me, beyond me?

Honestly, that’s what I’m aiming for, as I wend my way through this month of sacred fieldwork. Revelation is not simply reserved for the peak experience of Shavuot, dancing so far out on time’s horizon. No. Revelation is possible in every moment. What if I’m heading towards it, right now?

(image from Episode 7 of Father. Mother. God.)

It’s Thursday night… well, now it’s Friday morning… and I don’t have anything written yet. I don’t have anything I even want to say. I wrote nearly 2300 words the other night, letting sundown fall around me until the only glow in the entire house came off my darkened ‘night view’ screen, and none of it is what I want to share here, because it all poured out right from the middle of a raging storm within.

No filter, no perspective, no space. No poetry, even. Just chaos. And a brain dump of chaos is not being of service, even if some readers would find it relatable. Even if I roughly framed it up as a peek behind the curtain, as a friendly hand reaching out, saying, “hey, if you feel like this sometimes too, you’re not alone.” Somehow, my goal is still more than that. So here goes, from scratch…

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Since last week, I’ve been carefully picking my way through an interpersonal minefield while meticulously refraining from speaking about my uncoupled life in this public space. It is not my intention to dish. I wish neither to blatantly collude with you nor veil my intent, appearing just sober and high-minded enough in my presentation of ‘the facts’ that you find yourself unwittingly nodding along to my story, taking ‘my side.’

Sides. That’s funny. I wrote a breakup song a couple months ago. It wasn’t my idea. I was given a challenge, actually, to write one. And I took the challenge and said, okay, I’ll do it. But it has to be clean. It can’t be scraping the bottom of any pop music tropes for drama or dirt. It’s got to be so clean that it feels like a prayer to sing. It’s got to be so clean that if my ex were to hear it, well, maybe even she’d know that I did my best, am still doing my best. That I wish her the best, even now, from the other side.

That’s what the song is called. The Other Side.

So without getting into story, I will say this. Psychically, emotionally, practically, another few layers of saying goodbye and letting go happened this week and last. Layers of releasing and parting ways, disentangling energetically, of getting to practice holding new, clear and loving boundaries, and evolving them in real time. Nettle is still at work.

I continue to check all my actions and reactions with other people in recovery, with friends, fellow travelers, my new therapist. And I check with intuition, muscle-testing my superconscious engine of truth within. I don’t do anything unilaterally or impulsively. Right now, this is what self-responsibility looks like. Accountability to my highest self, but double checked. I’m not experiencing myself as trustworthy right now, so I enlist help to sift thoughts and emotions from reality. It’s like donning an exoskeleton of crowd-sourced wisdom. A permeable, living armor of community and higher-powered support, to get me through the endless present moments when I’m too discombobulated to act effectively on my own.

This is not just about relationship aftermath. It’s part of this long, long road of acclimating to a new life, unmedicated. And because of this long vision, this commitment, I am willing to override my immediate personal desires (to escape, to give in, to give up…) in pursuit of sobriety and the high road. I am willing to begrudgingly continue to be here, even when I’m not that thrilled about it at all. So every morning when I wake, I keep taking that damn bodhisattva vow. Singing “modet ani,” I am grateful… even when I’m not. Sometimes it works.

And I keep weaving my life together with the lives of others, weaving accountability and interdependence and coexistence into my days. In other words, I am not isolating. Sometimes I enjoy this weave, sometimes it’s pure calculation. A simple strategy, deploying and employing a safety net to protect that small tender hope within, that hope for a better walk through life. That hope that most of me, most of the time, still doesn’t even believe in. And yet… I keep renewing my commitment to see this experiment through, a little longer, one more day at a time. And in all of this, I am constantly willing to surrender my desire to be right, to think I have any handle on reality whatsoever, for the often very-outside-chance of being happy.

“Happy? What’s happy? I’m happy enough.” This is what my father said to me, when I tried to talk him out of his second wedding. He was miserable, mostly, and this “happy enough” was his best impassioned defense of his decision - to cement his commitment to a relationship that he already didn’t want to be in, but was too afraid to leave. I remember exactly where we were. Wooden chairs at the round kitchen table, in that old hunting-lodge-cum-retreat-center, far upstate in Berne, NY. Yellowed wallpaper surrounding us, afternoon light streaming in through the trees. I did not endorse that wedding. That marriage cost him his life.

I can relate to his not being happy. I’ve not been that happy right now either. But I’m also not “happy enough.” And you know what? I will never be “happy enough.” I’m not settling for misery and calling it “happy enough.” I’m going for the brass ring, even though frankly, most days, I’m not sure it’s there. Even though, metaphorically speaking, all the brass ring assures me is another whole round on this wicked, dastardly, heartbreaking carousel of life, and no guarantee that the next ride will be any better. Same horses. Same circle. Bodhisattva vow, indeed.

Yesterday, someone asked me whether now might be a good time to consider going back on some of my medications. You know, just for a while. Just until things “settle down.” It’s not the first time this summer that I’ve been asked that by a well-meaning friend. And I get it. What I’m doing is daunting and if you happen to be on the phone with me in a particularly bad moment, I might really freak you out. There have been a lot of moments lately, where this whole thing feels pretty unsustainable. This rattles me. I’m watching myself be rattled, and consciously choosing not to draw a conclusion from the rattling.

I’m waiting for time to take time, and for my community connections to deepen around me in my new home. I’m waiting for my somatic therapist to be back in the country and available for sessions again. I’m waiting for my roommates to move in more so that we can build a home together and I can stop rattling around in this big house alone because in times like this, I’m pretty awful company for myself! I’m waiting for enough creative stability and even-keeled moments in a row that I can look past the waves to a farther horizon, vision out beyond a mere few weeks at a time, and start to get a sense of possible momentum towards a future worth living. I’m waiting for these tiny ideas and right next steps that I’m taking towards my evolving livelihood to make any sense to me.

But I’m not waiting to act - I’m taking all the steps anyway, sense-making being entirely redundant and unnecessary to this whole creative process.

And I’m very imperfectly practicing patience, which is not, according to Tibetan wisdom, a matter of biding time, as we generally think, but is in fact an imperturbability in the face of whatever arises. A constancy. An “is that so” that allows for spaciousness and just enough remove to be able to laugh at samsara’s show. And so I am returning, moment by moment, to a vision that I can still hardly see, but am deciding anyway, is there. Because I’m not ready to fold.

I’m in my infancy, in this new life. After spending the better part of nine years medicated, and self-medicating for so many of the years before, I owe it to myself to keep pushing on with this dogged endeavor of waking up and homecoming to something more true than habit and story and deep grooves. I owe it to myself to believe in something better than this. And no, I’m not promising myself that anything particularly magical is going to happen when I hit the one-year-mark a few months from now. I know better than to expect a switch to suddenly be flipped, everything to suddenly become “easy.” I know that momentum, that progress, is not linear. It’s not a 45 degree upward trending line. There will be cycles - of hormones, of seasons, of the days of the week. Cycles set off by current events, by anniversaries, by accidentally missing a meal or having a bad dream or simply waking up in the morning in a different place than where I ended the night before. And the downturns of those cycles may feel like “setbacks.” But “setback” is a story, a fantasy. One that I don’t have to indulge in or tell.

Can I take my setbacks creatively, as an increase in the creative tension between current reality and what’s yet to come? Can I revel in the rising stakes, resting back in confidence on the premise that tension seeks resolution, and takes the path of least resistance, and that my job is simply to hold steady, hold firm, hold the vision of that blurry but still emerging desired end result and let the currents run their course? Can I, despite my thoughts and feelings and all the tempting stories of unsustainability, hold the vision of a rising spiral over time? I think so. I’m practicing so. I’m finding out. Even though I’m not that happy about it.

I can’t tell you how many times a day I practice refraining. Refraining from drawing conclusions. Refraining from judgment or fantasy. Refraining from doubt. Refraining from harm. It reminds me of going to the movies, where in order to fully enter into the show, I suspend my disbelief. And so I am suspended. Neither believing, nor not believing. Neither coming nor going. Neither convinced, nor unconvinced. Neither here nor there. The hanged man, still hanging. Seeing everything differently, and at a remove. I am hanging with the tension. Hanging with the unknown. Hanging with the discomfort. Hang in there…

What I’m inquiring into here, what I’m circling around, in a very messy, real-time and incomplete way, is something about boundary and contradiction. About responsibility and response-ability. About paradox and paradigm. About straddling worlds.

I come by this circuitous quest honestly. My Hebrew name is עברי, or Ivri. It’s the oldest recorded name for the Hebrew people - well before ‘Jew’ or ‘Israelite’ or ‘Hebrew’ - and it originally stems from a description of Abraham, who came “from the other side” of the river Euphrates1. But it’s not just about crossing a physical river; it’s about crossing a psychic river, a karmic river, a potentially uncrossable-yet-still-crossable river, from the wilderness to the promised land. It’s about the transcendence of the six paramitas - pursuing liberation on the other shore2. It’s about dancing across the boundaries between one dimension, one worldview, one history, and the next. The boundaries between contradiction and communion, tradition and radical reinvention. And it’s about going against the tide, against convention, for the sake of the Divine.

It was ivri of me, when I stepped into an evangelical bible church in 2022 as a queer Jewish Buddhist, willing to seek the Divine even in a forbidding and fundamentalist Christian setting. It was ivri of me when I began my return to my Jewish roots at the same time. It is ivri of me to talk about ivri and the paramitas in the same breath. I weave. I wayfind. I transgress. All concepts are limiting, all fleeting understandings a patch that will eventually wear off3. The divergence, the contradiction, it doesn’t stop me. It enthralls me. Power, powerlessness. Paradox, paradigm. Every possible framework is just one more finger pointing at the moon.

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You see, when it came time, in late 2024, for me to choose a Hebrew name (see the final episode of my comic for the illustrated version of this story), I didn’t want to be named after anyone in the entire Torah. They’re all so… complicated. So objectionable. So flawed or simply unknowable. Could I trust any of these ancestors with my own identity? I didn’t want to inherit that baggage.

So I chose Ivri, with its connotations of boundary dancing, transgression and reinvention. I chose it because it was a name for a whole people, a whole lineage that I was actively, consciously reclaiming - because the only inheritance that my father left me in his passing was the paisley tie I took off his dead body, and, abandoned though they were at the time, our Jewish roots. I admit, I also thought it was a clever sidestep, a way to avoid any unwanted mythological ‘side effects’ of whatever flawed ancestor my namesake might be. If I’d wanted an infinite wrestling match after all, I could have simply chosen to name myself after Jacob, for he is my very much a spiritual brother to me. Trickster, disguised. God-wrestler, getting lamed and renamed. That happened to me already, when I took the name Play. An illustrated version of that story appears in episode three of Father. Mother. God. .

Ivri felt queer and embodied, countercultural and deeply traditional, all at the same time. It’s actually becoming a name for a whole emergent ethos within Judaism - one that really speaks to me, and inspires me, and which I deeply love to witness and live and dream into. The irony is, when it comes to the baggage? The joke’s on me. I didn’t want to be named after anybody. Now I’m named after everybody.

I think that’s an appropriate framing for the dialectic that’s about to ensue. Because - yes that took a minute, thanks for hanging in with me here - I want to turn my lens to the paradigms of recovery and creation, which are not as different as one might think. The world is - was, is being - created, and we are here, attempting to recover - to recover ourselves and recover a relationship and a glimpse of the world’s, and our own, true nature. Unity. Wholeness. To recover, uncover, discover our true potential and unharmed basic goodness. The inherent wisdom-love that pulses through every atom, that surrounds us, that is us. And we are doing this, all while walking around in these meat-suits that we overly identify with, mistakenly wedding ourselves to both our stories and our pain, all because separation and egoic identification are the base price of admission to the human experience. You want to get on the ride? Sure, you’re tall enough. Just surrender your innate experience of divine union and put on this mask. Take a name. Welcome to the delusory land of “self” and “other”…

And somewhere along the line, the self gets hurt, makes mistakes, ingrains habits, maybe becomes an addict or an enabler or a rescuer or a bystander, none of which are any worse or better than the next, really. All of us are wounded, and nobody gets out alive.

Enter recovery.

Traditional recovery starts with Step One, a simple admission of powerlessness and unmanageability. “We admitted we were powerless over X (fill in the blank with the substance, process, circumstance, compulsion or person of your choice), and our lives had become unmanageable.” This is the jumping off point because in active addiction, no matter our street smarts or book smarts or even our emotional intelligence, our greatest thinking, as program wisdom goes, got us “here.” The bottom. Crawling in the door, utterly humbled. Because nobody comes in on a winning streak.

In this context, humility and surrender are a very useful starting point. They help focus us internally. They help us to stop making excuses: stop blaming, shaming, explaining, or complaining. Instead of continuing our futile efforts to run the show, or to pave the whole world with leather, as Shantideva put it, we can simply put on a pair of shoes. Admitting to Step One is the beginning of letting grace enter in, and it begins with the Gift of Desperation (that’s a sneaky little acronym for God, btw), which enters us at the exact shattering moment when we can finally acknowledge, I need help. I can no longer do this alone. And then - oh, I don’t have to…

Step One, relief that it is, can also be very off-putting. Between the admission of powerlessness and all the “God language” that follows, it’s enough to keep plenty of people away from the rooms. It did, me.

It can also look like a major contradiction when compared with the premises I espouse as a creator. Because as creators, one of our first steps is to admit something else entirely: “We are powerful.” Powerful beyond belief, powerful beyond measure. Our thoughts create reality, our focus creates reality, our beliefs create reality. There’s a lot to this, much more than I can say right now, and better alchemists and philosophers than me have been writing about the underlying mechanics of creation for thousands of years. But to wildly oversimplify here, at the end of the day, it all boils down to radical self-responsibility. We create it all.

In other words, nothing is happening TO me, it’s happening BY me. And then, as I evolve, perhaps it occasionally happens THROUGH me, as an open channel. And beyond that, if I continue to dissolve my attachment to my small self and live in greater alignment with Source, with all-that-is, I may even get momentary experiences of life happening AS me. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

Powerlessness versus Power. It seems like a contradiction, but it’s not. To me, it’s more like a koan. A paradox of dueling paradigms. Yet as I dance across the borders of these two worldviews, I weave them together into an even more coherent whole. Come. Dance with me. Because the way I see it, they don’t oppose. They nest.

How can I assert that I’m powerful, and then take Step One? Well, a lot depends on what I fill into that “powerless over” blank.

I am powerless over having an ego. The instinctual drive towards attachment comes with the territory of being human. I am powerless over having limiting beliefs and ensuing habits. We all have them, and even when we learn to neutralize them, they can creep back in when we aren’t looking, and we get to neutralize them all over again. I am powerless over my past. Meaning, it happened. It’s over, yet I carry it with me, and unconsciously - that’s the key - all the lessons and conclusions and beliefs that I draw from my past will still inform my present thoughts and emotions, my actions and reactions, every day of my life. Unless I interrupt them.

And I can interrupt them, I may even fully uproot them, eventually. But there’s no simply erasing them, because they’re ‘mine.’ In other words - I am powerless over my unique flavor of incurred damage. Adventitious stains. I can’t trade in my wounds for anybody else’s. Whether I employ the refined tools of karmic purification, awakening, radical self-responsibility and a lifetime of spiritual upgrades or I use lesser implements - of denial or gaslighting, mistaken affirmations or spiritual bypassing, the baseline is the same. Those core wounds are mine for the duration of the ride.

But that’s it! I’m ‘human!’ That’s the end of what I’m powerless over! And the amazing part is, all that powerlessness boils down to what, in the creative orientation, is just one of the two basic postures we can choose to inhabit4. They boil down to our egoic orientation. Shorthand, we’ll call this Set A. In our Set A, we ignorantly cling to a self, and our Set A option will always be to cling to a self, using our past to orient us towards our future. But we don’t have to live life from that perspective. We can choose to level up. We can choose a more powerful route. A route of awareness. We can choose… Set B.

Set B - the second posture, is where radical self-responsibility steps in. This actually DOES happen in the steps, but it tends to be hidden, obscured beneath the shadow of Step One and all the language of powerlessness. Doing our inventory, finding our part, cleaning up our side of the street? That all assumes we have power. There is a wish-fulfilling jewel in the work of finding our part - asking, what role did I play in this mess, even if it was just “being there” at the time?. The gift is this: if we created THAT, then just think what ELSE we could create. If I actually created all the worst things that happened in my life, all the ‘bad’ patterns and turns of events, all the crippling habits and moments of “this, again?!,” that’s powerful. Just imagine if I started creating On Purpose instead of on autopilot. Imagine if I created from my true heart. Aware. Conscious. Superconscious, even. From a place that’s healthy and whole. From my connection to Spirit, to Source, to Higher Power, to the Divine. THIS is where centering love comes in.

When we’re in our ego, in Set A, we’re driven by our wounding. Even a ‘good’ idea, even a ‘creative’ one can be a reaction to our wounds. I want to heal… because I’m hurting. I want to make art… because then this pain will have been worthwhile. Meaningful. And that’s fine. But as Rollo May writes in his 1975 book The Courage To Create, creating isn’t inherently a pathological act. It’s also a generative one. It doesn’t happen only as a response to suffering. It can happen for greater reasons. I say, it can happen with bodhichitta. It can happen for pure love.

The shorthand for my noticing I’m in my Set A is this - to catch any limiting thought, any doubt, discouragement, self-pity, as soon as I can. Any idea that includes a hint of “I can’t because…,” or is simply blind to the always-infinite-possible - and then arrest it. Pause. Bow to it. Acknowledge it. Thank it, even, for doing its best on my behalf. And then shift into a greater level of awareness, and choose the higher over the lower. As many times as it takes. As soon as I can. Re-arouse bodhichitta. Recommit to my true level. Remember my true nature.

Even in the midst of suffering, this is possible. Even in the midst of pain. Because crossing over - crossing the boundary, changing sets, reorienting around my true level, in other words, being ivri - is always available. Baruch Hashem, that capacity is baked into my true nature. I mean, it’s even my name. So, can I code-switch? Can I cross-dress? Can I choose freedom, in every moment, and gradually shrink the time I spend anywhere else? I’m betting I can. I’m here to find out. How about you?

And from there, love (which, from a Buddhist point of view, is the unconditional wish for beings to be happy) would naturally extend to compassion (again, from a Buddhist point of view, the wish - and attendant action towards actualizing that wish - that all beings be free from suffering), which would naturally extend to bodhichitta, that core Buddhist premise and principle, that most spicy and delectable alchemical blend of wisdom and compassion together which becomes, as a fuel source, the most potent and inexhaustible and clean-burning wellspring of energy for beneficial action and creation in the entire world.

There’s a lot I could say about this. I mean, just for starters, bodhichitta is the core premise that I find absolutely required, non-negotiable, in order for any of my other creating to truly be worthwhile. I’ve heard a lot in creative development circles about ‘art for art’s sake’, and how true creating is just creating for the pure love of it, no other reason necessary. But that’s simply not the sort of creator I am.

I know the power of bodhichitta, of arousing that heartfelt aspiration, that intention - that everything I do is on behalf of all sentient beings, that even the smallest and most evidently meaningless and inconsequential act could be performed as a powerfully sacred offering for the enlightenment of all - and following it with action. And so I know that bodhichitta transforms ANY act from an ordinary into an extraordinary one. So in my experience, creating for the sake of creating, without bodhichitta, is nothing near the same degree of magnitude as creating for the sake of creating, WITH bodhichitta.

This is what I was expecting to write about. This is the sandbox in which I was hoping to play.

But first, I have to ask you a question.

What do you do when you get jalapeño in your eye?

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Everyone I’ve ever asked this question responds the same way. They cringe viscerally, and then they offer me an antidote. Flush it with saline or cold water, even milk (capsaicin being fat soluble, that theoretically could work).

That has never been my response. I don’t know when I first came up with it, but do you know what I do, when I am in the kitchen and I find I have accidentally stuck myself in the eye with my jalapeño fingers? I touch the other eye.

I touch the other eye because then the sting becomes inescapable. It broadens out and becomes balanced. It’s no longer lopsided, and despite the instant stereo increase in intensity to have both eyes stinging instead of just one, I experience the effect as more generalized and diffuse. There’s no getting around it, and thus I can relax into it. I can smile in it. For me, it’s enlivening, invigorating even, to be stung in this way. A clarity and spaciousness emerge that almost remind me of a good dose of sananga (although admittedly, my jalapeño hack lacks all of sananga’s health benefits). I am not a healthcare practitioner. Everybody knows better than to stick hot peppers in their eyes. Please don’t try this at home (but if you DO, and that’s entirely on you, I’d love to hear about it).

Why am I telling you this?

Because until I stuck my finger in my eyes while making lunch the other day, I was having trouble breaking a pattern that had been looping for days, and hadn’t been serving me very well at all.

To provide context: this is the first time I’m experiencing Mom’s yahrzeit without any medications to dull the effects of my feelings. Everything has been amplified to an almost unbearable degree. It has been full-on ceremony around here, and the trip-sitting is constant. I handled the weekend alright. It was uncomfortable, but not bad. My self-care was on point and I used all the tools. I reminded myself that just because I don’t feel good doesn’t mean I’m not doing good. But the pattern kept escalating. It went something like this:

I feel a feeling. It’s not “bad,” necessarily, partly because I am working so hard to refrain from labeling or rejecting anything as “bad.” But it’s “big,” and I respond to its bigness with fear. I don’t want to be overwhelmed by it, I don’t want to be consumed by it. I don’t want to fall apart and break down and thus inadvertently prove to myself “once and for all” that all I’m good for in this world is surviving my own miserable thoughts and feelings. I also don’t really want to cry, not that hard. Not so hard that my eyes will hurt for hours afterwards, which is how big feelings like this always, eventually, will make me cry. For the record, crying hurts my eyes far worse than jalapeños do.

But what you resist, persists. And so the feeling I’m dodging gets bigger. And so does the resistance. And so does the feeling. And then we loop, and gain speed. And the next thing I know, I’m caught up resisting something that I’m actually trying to make peace with, but am still frankly afraid of. Why? Because of the stories that I’m trying not to tell. Because of the power that I’m trying not to give away. But by withholding it, ironically, I’m already giving it all away. Lost in a fantasy of judging myself for having feelings, judging myself for having needs.

It took my therapist, and several others, to point out the obvious to me: The feelings that I’m having right now? They are normal feelings to have in these circumstances. NORMAL feelings.

Now, I’m not on a quest to be ‘normal’ here, but it certainly helps when someone reflects back to me that the overwhelming and crippling waves of grief that I have been wading through are appropriate amounts of feeling to be having. And that I am having them, unmitigated, in many ways, for the very first time.

The summer that my mother died, I wasn’t on prescription drugs. I was eight months sober to the day, and I had been watching myself decompensate all spring. Despite not wanting to go back on head meds again, I’d already taken steps to leap through all the hoops of getting established within the local mental health system, because I was alarmed at how difficult everything was becoming for me, and I didn’t want things to progress to a more dangerous place. My sobriety was solid, and everyone in the rooms was applauding my progress, especially that I was now off the Adderall (for some reason, that particular drug has more of a stigma in recovery rooms than non-stimulant psych medications. Meanwhile, nobody questions their coffee…).

I was getting better at noticing and naming my feelings. I was most of the way through my steps - in two fellowships at once. I was handling my professional life, and two steady long-term contracts. I had learned to snowboard. I was learning to mountain bike. I was open water swimming again. A lot was, on the level of basic appearance, pretty okay. But internally, I was in free fall. Feeling increasingly less stable, less grounded. Lacking reliable perspective and access to capacity.

Because of this, I’d decided to take the summer off from work. Now, especially when my neuroses are running the show, I can be pretty awful at taking “time off” - so the fact that I was willing to experiment with two months of ‘too much’ time on my hands says something very specific. It says that I knew I wasn’t up for the task of showing up reliably in my professional life in this time. It says I knew that I needed to recalibrate how I was showing up and caring for myself personally, in this time. It says that some part of me knew that I needed this space. That things might get worse before they got better. And that was before Mom took her life.

As it turned out, the week Mom died, I finally had an intake session on the books with a nurse psychiatrist. You know how that goes (or don’t you?). Earlier that spring, after getting established as a patient in the system, I’d reached out as my suicidal ideation mounted. First I was told that there were no openings for new patients at all but then, because my case sounded so acute, they said could get me in. In six weeks. I had to push the appointment out until I returned from Mom’s funeral, but when I finally walked in there, I basically said, “I don’t want the drugs, but give me the drugs. My life right now depends on it.” I was scared, I was desperate, I didn’t want to follow my parents, and I didn’t know of any other choices. And so in an instant, the psychotropic merry-go-round began to spin once again.

What started as one drug grew to two, then three. I couldn’t sleep with the grief, so we added drugs for that too. Another one, then more. At one point, I think I was on five head meds, altogether. The sleep meds, I kicked eventually, but the other three remained, despite periodic attempts to eliminate them, and I was on them until eight months ago exactly. Eight months sober when Mom died. Eight months REALLY sober - emotionally, psychiatrically sober - while walking through her yahrzeit this week. So my point is - this is actually the FIRST TIME that I am intentionally, consciously facing my mother’s passing unmedicated. Unaltered. Unescaping. No wonder I don’t want to be swept away. No wonder it took two days of tiptoeing around before I finally gave myself over to the tears.

This is work that, as one of my aunts said the other day, literally nobody else in the family is even trying to do. And it is work that I am wittingly, intentionally doing, on behalf not only of myself, but of the whole family line. Because why? Well, I’m brave and stubborn. But also, bodhichitta.

I’ve heard it said that we don’t get into recovery to feel better, but to feel better. That is, to increase our capacity to feel functionally, in better ways. Even if what we’re feeling isn’t “better” at all. Unfortunately, we also have to feel, in order to feel better. And sometimes feeling just kind of sucks.

So my job is to not make stories out of the feelings. Neither accept nor reject them. And more explicitly, to not mistake judgments or fantasies or stories for feelings in the first place. “I’m all alone, nobody understands me, I’m going crazy…” are not feelings. They’re stories. Fantastical stories. And I do love a good story. So why not make them good ones?

Because you know what? My capacity is fucking HUGE. I have the capacity - and the willingness - to feel ALL this hard stuff, head on, and walk through it, and metabolize it, and recalibrate in the midst of it, and bless it, and find gratitude for it, and make art and music from it, and be of service to others right from the raging middle of it, and then start all over again the next day when it feels like I’m back at square one, without making any undue meaning about being “back at square one.” So the question isn’t really about my capacity, in the end. It’s this -

How quickly can I remember to stick my finger in the other eye?

Can I make a better story? A story that centers love, and hope, and healing, but without hope or fear hijacking my outrageous ambition? Can I make a story that honors me for what I’m facing, honors my family for the initiation that it handed me, honors my mother for doing the best she possibly could? Can I step right into the fire, willingly, and be grateful for the flames? Can I embrace the grief? Can I embrace the burn? Can the poison itself be the medicine I seek?

My mother loved me fiercely. She gave me that love from the moment I was born. Was it wounded? Yes. Was it difficult to receive? Yes. Did I pit myself against her for decades? Yes.

But in return, I also know, I gave her wonder.

A friend of mine looked at this picture the other day, taken right after my birth, and she said as much. “Look at her face. That expression while she nurses you, that says, ‘are we actually DOING this?!.’ She gave you love. And you gave her wonder.”

Yes, those both are true. My eyes are burning. And I am alive.

As I approach my twenty-fourth week at this project, I can see this happening, quietly. Slowly, people are finding me and subscribing - in some cases, even paying something towards this journey. To those of you who have taken this action, I thank you - your investment is a beautiful entrustment, not only in me, but in our collective unfolding. And yes, I AM finding myself in new conversations and new orbits - with fellow travelers, fellow creators, fellow healers. As one shaman friend of mine would say, “you’ve come a long way, and you have forever to go.” So with forever to go, no finish line to reach (and a deep nod to AnSah for their song, Finish Line), but a distinct

sense of getting somewhere, here we are. I am claiming victory, as a practice, even amidst the swirl and chaos of what rumbles inside. I am claiming mastery, as a discipline, even whilst being buffeted about by the winds of my own change.

This week, that somewhere we are getting to just happens to bring with it the eve of my mother’s fourth yahrzeit (death anniversary). It also marks being one year out from my soul safari trip to South Africa last summer. A trip made possible in large part thanks to the money my mother had left me (thanks, Mom). Mom, who in her post-working years was living on food stamps and constantly worried about making ends meet, yet somehow managed to help send me to Africa in her passing. She’d been to Africa once. The whole time I was there, I felt like I was going to run into her. To meet her again. In a way, I think, I did. How amazing.

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And so in honor of that, I want to call attention to another central premise that informs every step of my way. I want to tune into the heart of the magic. The premise, in fact is this:

REQUIRE MAGIC

What do I mean by magic? I do not mean ‘magical thinking,’ which I personally tend to define as that naive notion that I might be rescued - from myself or my circumstances - by some benevolent power from outside. I also do not mean ‘magical thinking’ as it’s more commonly construed; the superstitious belief or concern that one’s (for the most part, wholly untamed) thoughts will exert undue influence on a situation, manifesting as reality, for better or for worse.1

I do not mean magic as in sleight of hand, mere trick or illusion. I also do not mean ‘look for the miracles,’ although miracles are, when we slow down to look for them, indeed, all around, quite magical and worth looking for. No. What I mean by magic is the convergence of clear, clean will and aligned action, with intention, within a sound creative structure. As such, magic can take forms ranging from the simplest structure of holding attention in a solitary activity, through to the most elaborate levels of collective ceremony or ritual.

When I refer to magic, I mean the magic of transcending the small self and reaching for our most authentic manifestation and evolution - our very connection to Source. I mean alchemizing our shadows into our light, our fears into our courage, our lead into our gold, here in this very lifetime, moment by moment, right now. When we do this, we are not ‘manipulating’ reality in some untoward, ungodly way. Rather, reality itself becomes magical. Reveals itself to be magical. To be far less fixed, and far more mutable, than we had heretofore realized. Forces of truth and love, both seen and unseen, in magical moments gather mightily, conspiring only for the highest good. Propelling us towards our highest destiny, despite all appearances to the contrary. This is what I mean by magic.

Magic is synergy - where the sum is greater than its parts. Magic is attunement - the tuning of my heart to the world, and the world to me. My heartstrings humming in harmony with the heartbeat of life.

Requiring magic, then, requires leaning into something beyond what I can wrap my rational mind around. Requiring magic requires letting go of my need to know. Requiring magic requires transcending my smallness. Which means transcending my concepts, my ideas, my limiting beliefs.2

Magic itself requires something of us - that we surrender the notion that there is “a way things are,” or even more confining, the notion that we “need to know” everything that’s coming, in order to proceed.

So acknowledging magic is one thing. Admitting the existence of the inexplicable, the uncanny, the wondrous - that’s a start. But REQUIRING magic - that goes one step farther. Not just saying “okay, I believe in magic, I believe in something I cannot tangibly touch or see, but which courses through me. I allow myself to be overtaken by awe. I actively seek wonder.” No. Requiring magic goes beyond even this - to a place where I am audacious enough to set goals, to claim and articulate my innermost heart’s desires (NOT a thing we are commonly taught, by the way, in this contradictory and misleading world of Puritanical materialism that so thoroughly divorces us from our own hearts!). Requiring magic is to set out on a path of action towards a holy destination, even whilst seeing no obvious way to reach it. Even whilst having no idea how it will happen. No way, that is, except for magic having a hand.

Requiring magic is audacious work. It is not for the faint of heart. It is not about playing small or playing it safe. It does not fall in line with traditional plans or conventional ‘wisdom.’ It is often neither linear nor predictable. It may not look like it “makes sense” from the outside. But requiring magic IS about putting my money where my mouth is, aligning my actions and my values such that my values are constantly being reinforced, being enacted, each step of the way. Requiring magic is precisely how I credential myself - the work I do, and the modalities I coach in - through the very ways that I live my own life. Each choice that I make, each decision, each intuitively-driven act of creation, when it springs from this premise, sets me up to raise the stakes, raise the tension, on living a creative life. And because tension seeks resolution3 along the path of least resistance, when I hold this heightened tension well, then I’m even more assured of success. Circumstances be damned.

I have heard it said that, if you want to experience magic in your life, then you need to have choices that require magic. Choice is a term of art in my world. Choice refers to a well-languaged statement claiming a specific desire. An end result. Written in clean, compelling language, devoid of any limiting logic or beliefs, it is a way marker that I can literally choose to orient towards, out loud, on a daily basis, almost as if I’m setting my heart’s compass for the day. I make my choices every morning. I derive them from intuitive practices of shamanic journeywork, fine tune and calibrate their language with a mentor or coach of my own to ensure they are as vibrationally effective and powerful as possible, and then I work with them consistently, daily, for up to a year at a time. The thing about choices is, the good ones ALL require magic. If a choice can be realized without magic intervening, magic won’t intervene. It won’t have to. If your choices are so modest that you can see your way to them, every step of the way, from the start line, then magic becomes redundant. It won’t come around. If you even think you understand your choices fully, they might not yet require enough magic to fully activate your synergy with Source. But if your choices, your goals, are so big that you can’t possibly comprehend them completely - can’t possibly see the way forward - if they’re so audacious that unexpected synergies and alignments and turns of events simply MUST unfold in order to carry you onwards - then guess what, you hold that tension long enough, and the magic will come.

Require Magic. It sounds almost insane, when I say it now. I can hear the self-conscious voices of reason inside me, even now, questioning this whole post. What are you doing, exposing yourself like this? This is indefensible! This is outrageous! This is too vulnerable! Dial it back! Require magic? What are you playing at?

Defensive voices, bestill. I’m going to be true to myself and forge ahead here, so let me try just one more tack. From a Hebrew perspective, we are all, it is said, b’tzelem Elohim. Made in the image and likeness of the Divine. To me, that means we are all imbued with divine creative force, because, whether you personally truck with a “creator God” concept or not, I think it’s safe to say that the Divine, ultimate nature of reality - whatever you call it, God or shunyata - Emptiness, of which compassion is the very essence - IS the source of all creation, as we experience it. So, being made in this image, we are all little creators too. And the more we align with Source, the more access to this creative force we have.

If we know the rules of creating, the world becomes a sacred sandbox. Sacred imagination4 unleashes a torrent of possibilities, which can become eventualities, and when coupled with clear action, ultimately, realities. But if we don’t know the rules of creating, we simply don’t get that far. We stay in our impaired imaginations, painfully reinventing the wheel and recreating what we already know, basing all our new creations solely upon what’s already come before. Like Groundhog Day.

I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my present and future possibilities are limited by my past. Where I’m in fear of ‘turning out’ like my Mom or Dad, or where I think, well, I made it to South Africa once, sure. But what makes me think I could get back there again?

That’s not the path I choose. Familiarity is not the same as safety. The dank cocoon of my ego and my habits is not, despite the known contours, a safer place for my spirit to thrive than the unknown expanse that awaits me. And so I choose to require magic. To stop hedging my bets. To couple my prayers and intentions with actions, to meet God in the Divine field of both creation and destruction and there, to collaborate beautifully. To claim victory, as a practice. To claim mastery, as a discipline. To make, and to love. And to make love.

You’re okay.

Nothing’s wrong.

Look outside. Do you see the trees? The bright yarrow and sweet pea, both blooming and entwined? Do you hear the birdcall? Do you see the sunshine and shadow dappling the ground? Do you see the woodpile, and the logs that you’re starting to cut? Everything is okay here. Nothing is wrong. This is it.

Now notice the house, inside. Do you feel the wood floors under your bare feet, starting to feel cleaner after your hours of sweeping and deep cleaning under washer, and dryer, and in all the corners? Do you see the fresh windowsills, momentarily free of cobwebs, and the inside of the just-scrubbed fridge? All these slowly tended spaces being touched and honored and revitalized? Do you see the food in the pantry, the careful restocking as you begin to honor yourself in this new home, as you even begin to consider enjoying cooking for yourself again? This is it.

And now look within yourself, your own body-house. Yes, you feel flooded. Yes, you could call this feeling, “overwhelm.” But what if nothing’s wrong? What if this “a lot” is just fine? You’re breathing. You’re healthy. You’re making it, day by day, through this long-term investment in a bravely unmedicated life. You made it into recovery. You made it through the fire of the past four months of transition, and longer. You made it into today. The crisis is over. The - crisis - is - over. This. Is. It.

You can exhale. You are home. You can land here. You can walk through this season of grief. You can land this emotional plane.

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It used to be, for years, that after a period of overexertion and disregarding my own limits, finally my emotional needs would come crashing in, demanding I attend to them. And without warning, I would go dark for days. Call into work or otherwise clear the next possible slate of days in my schedule. Cancel everything and stay in bed, shades drawn tightly against the daylight. Safe in the dark. Usually I would be nursing a steady buzz of some kind, aiming for just enough numbness and dissociation to maintain perfect remove, perfect stillness.

After a few days of this, I would slowly resurface. Acclimated. Stabilized. And the cycle would begin again.

I never got very far into understanding why this phenomenon would happen - I just accepted it as part of the contract of being me. Mostly, I contained the harm - I didn’t act out, I acted “in.” Often I would binge-watch the entire series of Orphan Black, however many episodes and seasons that year’s crash happened to bring. This meant that, over time, each blackout period could last even longer, and that suited me just fine. For some reason, the drama and horror and intelligence of that one show was just the right blend of ingredients to distract me from myself, there, in my isolated cocoon of self-medicating in the dark. I never understood how to prevent these episodes from occurring. I never knew why they occurred to me and not to others. Why handling the ‘basics’ of life seemed so much harder for me than it “should.” And once I was out of it, investigating any further seemed pointless. Irrelevant. Out of sight, out of mind. Until next time... In other words, I just learned to live with it.

I feel like I’ve been flirting with that state again. Not because of pushing myself too hard out of ignorance of my patterns, like I used to, or even out of willfully relying on stimulants to supersede my own limits, as I did in the days of my dutiful reliance on Adderall. Responsibly harnessing my energies in compliance to the capitalist machine, diligently building my business, hitting my targets, delivering my clients’ victory - how entrepreneurial! How valiant! How service-oriented! Ha ha ha.

This time, it’s different. I know I’ve been flirting with the edges of what I can well manage. I know it’s been a few solid months of tumult and uncertainty and rebuilding on constantly shifting ground. And now that the dust is settling and I’m finally finding myself in a safe place to land, my system is saying enough. Tend to us. The problem is, I’m still not expert at landing this plane. And actually, I haven’t had to land a plane like this in quite a while. I haven’t bottomed out, not a bottom like this moment is inviting me into, in a good couple of years. But old habits resurface with sinister invitation, inveigling their way in through the gaps in my vigilance. Sheer exhaustion has opened me to vulnerabilities that I thought I’d moved beyond.

The inner critic, for instance. The critical parent. The Mean Pilgrim, as I used to call her. Mostly, she’s been sidelined. Or shall I say, right-sized? Integrated? Re-assigned. Befriended. All of those things are true. Mostly, her voice doesn’t carry much weight anymore. I can hear her, recognize her tone, and say kindly, like a loving parent speaking to a child, “thanks for the input, and what about this idea instead…” And then we refocus together, or she quiets back down, and we leave it at that. But the past few days, she’s been loud and convincing. So immediate and pressing as to be nearly indistinguishable from “myself” (whoever that is), and I find myself accidentally believing the stories she’s telling as she scrambles to re-assert herself amidst the present opportunity of my ongoing discombobulation. So when it’s past noon and I haven’t eaten anything, and I suddenly think I’m having an existential crisis, when actually, I’m just, you know, hungry? That’s her doing. It’s up to me to catch her at the game, and say, “you know what? Let’s pause on this crisis for a beat. Let’s head down to the kitchen, you and me. Why don’t we revisit this idea over some lunch?”

So I’m in this new home now, with “a lot” to do in terms of rebuilding my life, refocusing my creative intentions, getting a bit more momentum around my writing and coaching again, putting structures in place that support me. And instead, my system is on high alert. Certain that something is wrong. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. And, when not finding anything “wrong” outside to engage with, it’s turning within. Fomenting panic and self-doubt. Looking to me as the source of this new supposed problem.

So this - “breathe, take it easy, look around…” is how I’ve been talking to myself, all day, every day, right now. Every morning I begin again, sometimes with several false starts. The exhaustion wears at me. Sometimes it keeps me up, late, enticing me to worry. Sometimes, it turns me over to merciful rest, and I go to bed well before dark, and keep sleeping far into the next day’s morning light.

It might be natural for my system to need to take a pause right now. It might be completely ‘normal.’ No cause for alarm. But I’m still, at least in part, wired for catastrophe. Inclined to draw negative conclusions. That insidious idea that something must be wrong, somewhere, whether within or without. This is precisely what I mean to interrupt. And so I pose the question, over and over again:

What if nothing’s wrong?

YES, it was just the tenth anniversary of the day you found out your Dad’s death was a suicide. Yes, the fourth anniversary of your mother’s suicide is just around the corner. Yes, your birthday was more poignant and heartbreaking than usual. Yes, it’s been “a lot.” And there will be more. But you can breathe, right now. You’re okay. Yes, your eyes are leaking water again. Yes, the feeling in your chest feels too big to bear. Yes, the heartache is ongoing. But what if this feeling is simply… life? What if nothing’s wrong? Can you handle that?

Can I handle nothing being wrong?

Can I handle… wait for it… happiness? Can I handle well-being? Can I handle joy? We all know how to suffer. Just how much goodness can I take?

In ceremony, as in retreat and recovery, we talk of integration. Integrating experiences, putting our insights into actions, integrating even the more unwelcome elements we might prefer to avoid or ignore. The real ceremony starts when the formal ceremony ends. The real ceremony is life itself. Which means, this moment now, all these myriad adjectival moments, however I label them, are all simply my present ceremony. And ceremony is intense. So when I remember this, then the intensity of a moment or day is no longer overwhelming or “bad.” It’s simply what it’s like to be alive, to be me, right now. It’s a big job, being fully alive. But that’s why I’m here. To come online, to wake up, to embody and actualize and channel even more.

Sometimes in ceremony I get a sense of déjà vu when I realize that the flooded, multi sensory, transdimensional experiences of the moment aren’t really that unique - in fact, my whole life feels like this! I have a hunch, it’s part of why I take to the medicine so well. I already spend a lot of my time with all the channels open, the inputs turned up all the way. Being flooded is commonplace, especially now, without the chemical guardrails of the medications choking it all down. So one thing ceremony does is help me normalize the waves. And remembering that life is ceremony, even more so.

If I call a feeling “grief,” then I am likely to be disappointed in it. If I call a sensation “overwhelm” or “sadness,” then some part of me, even while trying to neither accept nor reject it, still subtly wishes it would change into something… nicer.

But when I welcome these feelings without making meaning out of them, then I can see them for what they are. Not just messages from parts of me, not just raw data on how I am doing, but direct messages from the Divine itself. Evidence of my very own aliveness. Invitations back to wonder, invitations back to awe. Invitations to travel back to Source.

There are plenty of teachings to be found about thoughts and feelings not being real. Feelings aren’t facts, and all that. And that’s true. But mounting a defense based on this premise can set me up for an ill-advised battle, because what I resist, persists. Sometimes it takes a few days, but faster and faster lately, I can employ another angle on this, too. I can recall that however they appear, however they feel, all my thoughts and feelings are simply my true nature in disguise. Recognize the nature, and the disguise falls away.

What I’m left with, yet again, is my aliveness. That unbearable, groundless, overflowing sense of astounding aliveness that at times gets labeled “pleasure,” and other times gets labeled “pain.” But in each case, it is simply the reward for being here. The reward for being willing to be fully here.

So I had another string of hard days. Big deal. There’s no merit in painting the week with one dismal brush. Nothing to be gained by explicating the days, hour by hour. Sure, I felt bad, but nothing “bad” happened. I adjusted my expectations and took gentle care of myself. I fasted, and retreated into recovery meetings and outreach and exercise and rest, and then I re-emerged. By yesterday, I was “doing better” again. More functional, more focused, more clear. I could put my mind where I wanted to, and it would stay. A miracle! What cause for celebration! I celebrate that.

By last night, I was making music again, singing a spontaneous, silly and devoted song of kinship to myself in the darkness, relishing the remembrance that being truly present to myself and all of creation is indeed an always available, never-ending ceremony of One.

Today, a greater sense of creative and intellectual agency and joyful possibility is yet returning. A small sense of momentum. A curiosity at what’s to come. Wending my way through the weeds and mud of the week and back into the light of an elevated perspective is one part of that small victory. Re-contextualizing my experience, enhancing my renunciation and equanimity, as often as it takes to stay the course.

Because - what if nothing’s wrong? Can I accept the ever-open invitation to live in this field of great faith? This field, as I heard it said yesterday, of great faith in us? As a fellow traveler said to me this week, my Higher Power isn’t here to let me down. Which means the Divine has a great faith in me. And who am I to argue with that?

Join me as I zoom out a bit, put on a wider lens.

(a bench by my house, overlooking the river valley)

The changes underway right now are not just about lifting out of a single difficult scenario. They’re about breaking a karmic contract with a particular archetype in my life.

This is not about my former roommate, or my last partner, or my ex-wife, or even my mother. It’s about me. About my own response to stimulus. My own assumptions. My own agreements. The conditions that I thought needed to be present for me to thrive. The level that I thought I was on. Who I thought I needed to deal with, relate with, negotiate with. What I thought I deserved, was worthy of. This is about my core beliefs and agreements, and whether the limiting ones or the higher ones are running the show.

Being around an unsafe (or unavailable) person and thinking that if I just don’t rock the boat, that their volatility or withholding or abuse of power or lack of self-responsibility will somehow protect me, is faulty logic. But until now, it’s still been my default response. Not fight, but flight. Fawn. Freeze. Stay, as a signal of my loyalty. Disrupting the system unfolding with my roommate was a dramatic departure from that structure. A good start. But what’s the pattern interrupt to not just discontinue the old act, but to actually install a new action in its place? How quickly can I catch myself, and take contrary action, as we say in the rooms? How quickly can I do the opposite of what I’ve been, until now, most inclined to do?

Can my usual logical tropes around safety and belonging and conflict avoidance, instead of automatically leading to reinforcing the dynamics of apparent conflicts, become warning signals to me instead, that I’m veering off course? How radically can I practice speaking up, and out, and taking decisive new action, in the face of what I know is no longer truly tolerable, or acceptable, or safe? What does it look like to speak out with loving integrity? To investing my energy, not towards managing or controlling an unwanted situation or dynamic, but directly towards my truly desired end result? Can I relate to this opportunity not just as a stretch beyond my comfort zone, but to what it truly is - the safer, stronger, and more powerful move? Can I compost my entanglement with this controlling, oppressive archetype, hand it back to the Earth, and ask for it to be broken down into a new gift? I believe I can.

Two weeks ago, as my last written post went live, I had the chance to reset a boundary with the roommate in question. When it looked like she would be moving into the house just as I was returning from my work trip, I reached out to touch base directly. To see for myself what degree of volatility I was in for, and to determine how to handle it. I called her, and we spoke. And then the text messages began. Receiving her communications was destabilizing, and the next morning, I told her so.

She’d asked me for feedback. I said that the extent and content of her ongoing communications, still mired in story, still centering her own experience to the exclusion of all other, were an example of her continued acting out. That it exhibited a pattern of dominating the bandwidth and capacity of others, and that I was no longer available for it. I said that her own processing had to happen with people who were not already personally navigating the fallout of her actions. I said that my own presence in the house when I returned would in no way equal consent or availability for casual conversation, dialogue or story, and that any proper dialogue or repair processes with me would need to take place in a well-facilitated container, with timed shares. I said that I would be moving out after July. I said that I was redrawing my boundaries in real time, and that this communication from me was an example of that. I said all these things, in a text message. And then I drove away, fully expecting her to be in the house when I returned.

As it turned out, several friends and community members stepped in, in my absence, unwilling to let things unfold this way. And so, without my lifting a further finger to change things, everything changed. My own boundaries were reinforced and held, my vision was brought to fruition, and even surpassed, and the outcome is beyond what I could ever have imagined. A dissolution agreement was signed between that now-former roommate and our landlord, terminating her lease. New roommates, brought into the situation through the same community resourcing and prayer, immediately stepped in to fill the gap, paying rent for July even before they are able to move in.

And that’s some of the most potent bonus magic of this whole turn of events - that as of this moment, they aren’t here yet. Which means that, when I returned to the new house on my birthday weekend, at last, finally able to stay someplace, I returned to inhabit this place, for the time being, completely alone.

This solitude is a precious gift. A beautiful gift. Not only to have upgraded my companions-to-be, in making this new land our home, but more immediately, the chance to live alone for a time here. To find my own rhythm and stride. To create a baseline of how I want to be in this new place, in my own time. I haven’t lived alone in years, not since my one-room flat in Dublin in 2006. And before that, my even tinier sailboat in Marina Del Ray. The last time I lived in a proper house-shaped-house on my own, I was twenty. It’s been a while.

I was planning a road trip for August. An adventure to the Pacific Northwest, to a Jewish cultural festival and to visit some friends. As of now, I am no longer planning that trip. I am planning to stay here instead. To soak in this chance to find my flow and equilibrium in solitude, after four months of uncertainty and constant interactivity and change. It is strange, to not be taking that adventure. It is strange, that events that I so deeply long for, theoretically - a weekend of Jewish music and workshops, the chance to see friends and family I haven’t seen in years - is so clearly not the next right move. I don’t 100% love this truth, but I trust it. I trust my intuition enough to know that if I don’t have an opening to do something, I’m best off not to force it. Not to let my self-will run riot. I’m best served by paying attention to the insights I get - because doing so creates a reinforcing loop, sending the message to my subconscious that those insights are valuable, and actionable. And then those insights keep coming. It’s simply the law of use. If I were to disregard them, the wellspring of intuition would run dry. So I’m listening. And I am staying home.

When my new roommates do arrive, I will have been tending this place for a month, maybe more. Already I am deeply cleaning it - all its neglected corners, both inside and out. I am tending the land, trimming back the overgrowth, consolidating the rubbish pile as detritus surfaces from under the cut-back-thorns. The external drama is over. Now I will literally begin to chop wood (though thankfully, not carry water). Nothing is complicated. As the Zen saying goes, I’ll eat when I eat. And I’ll sleep when I sleep.

When I look back on the past four months, I can see what I have created. I can see the power of holding an end result, holding the feeling-tone of a desired vision, even while the details remained unclear. This morning I did a completion on this whole transition window. Acknowledging all that I have created and learned, as well as what I’m letting go of. The up-leveling of my own boundaries, my internal compass and clarity. The beauty, artwork, music, and community weaving that has happened since leaving Tahoe and landing here. The new creations, that will happen here. The here, that is already happening, here.

If this is what I created, even amidst the messiness and chaos of it all, then this is some powerful magic. If I could have stayed in that house, if we’d not been given notice to leave right away, then I would likely not have up-leveled myself in these ways. I would still be shrinking somewhere, tolerating conditions and situations that I’m best served by not tolerating. Instead, I can be curious. I can say - if I could create this, just imagine what I can create next? After all, just look at the amount of creative tension I was able to hold, in order to land here. I’ve upped my level as a creator. I’ve upped my ability to be grounded in the unknown. The whole discipline of not looking for a place to live because that’s what guidance told me to do? It’s a perfect example of that. I used to carry stories of not belonging, that extended themselves to stories about my inability to find a proper place to live. This turn of events puts those stories to bed. The past is over. I am writing a new book of life. I didn’t even have to find this home, to find this home.

I am thinking about the structures I want to put in place here. Not just physical structures: arranging the rooms, trimming the hedge, acquiring rugs, but behavioral structures. Time in nature, spirit walks, time for music and writing and drawing. Structures that support my making magic, no matter what.

Community living IS an experiment. And I am confident that, building upon the foundation of this precious time alone, I will be up for the continued experiment. The messy middle of this particular transition is over. Now I can begin to ground, and arrive. The moving out is over. Now comes the moving in.

This morning, my mentor Ellen reminded me of something. As she said, “it always comes right if you keep going, so if it’s not right, it’s not the end.”

And structures will always die to create something new. We have this idea that we’re looking for permanence, or stability, and the learning here for me is that just because it (the other house, the relationship, the fill-in-the-blank) was temporary doesn’t mean it wasn’t created by me properly. This transition was not a bad creation. Permanent isn’t good and temporary isn’t bad. Though I could do with a bit less of it, chaos isn’t bad either. It’s all a constant evolution. Things won’t stay the same, and especially when I’m not loyal to the old structures, then things are likely going to be even more temporary. But they’ll be better each time, because that’s what I’m doing. That’s where I am.

Here. Moving on, to something better.

I drafted something in advance, then found it entirely inadequate, irrelevant and inauthentic to share when I got back to it. And then I was out of time. Rather, I had time, but I made the careful decision to prioritize human, in-person interactions1 over sequestering myself to make a deadline that, let’s face it, nobody but me probably even noticed that I missed.2 Forcing and manipulating myself into performing just wasn’t in me. It’s not how I roll anymore.

I told myself I’d post something over the weekend “if I wanted to.” I didn’t want to. I didn’t have the spoons, and it simply wasn’t appropriate to my needs or the moment to push myself to write from the middle of where I was.

I have worked hard to overcome my addictive traits of perfectionism and my black and white, all-or-nothing thinking. Which means, I am still practicing very hard right now, being okay with this ‘failure to post.’ This glaring break in the perfect streak of my weekly writing practice.

Yesterday was my birthday, and I gave the lead share at an evening online recovery meeting. Getting myself to that meeting helped me make it through what was, ultimately, a remarkably beautiful, and also remarkably difficult, day. A day where my grief and overwhelm went hand in hand with gratitude and relief and love. A day where I told a friend not to come celebrate me unless she just wanted to hold space while I cried. A day where I ended up finally finding comfort and solitude, late at night, watching Yentl in the bathtub.

If you’ve never been to a recovery meeting before or heard a lead share, the basic premise is to tell what it was like (before recovery), what happened (in getting sober), and what it’s like now.

This was an integration meeting, meaning, how do we integrate our practices, our recovery, all the parts of our life.

I spoke far too fast. I wish I’d left some space to breathe. I was crying hard, right before the meeting, and I didn’t feel gathered or centered at all when I dove in. But I recorded the share, as a snapshot of a moment’s sobriety. A waymarker to look back upon, on a future date. And then I realized today, well, that’s my birthday post.

So here it is. Raw as ever. Enjoy. And, happy birthday to me. I am here. I am alive.

There is a word in Tibetan for drawing a boundary with clear intention, to create a safe and focused container for inner work. The word is tsam. It actually means retreat, but in this case, the ‘retreat’ in question is my whole life. For the record, in my book, a retreat does NOT automagically equal “a good time.” Retreats can be magical, but they are also hard work. Same for life. As my comic says, it’s magic and it hurts.

(image from Father. Mother. God. episode 11)

My nettle dieta was about boundaries. Those boundaries are still being erected - drawn and redrawn - in real time. The boundaries I had while in the midst of the dieta are already not as strong as the boundaries I have now. I am adding bottom lines to my life, literally by the hour, and still not fast enough for how quickly things are falling apart.

You know that new house? The one I wrote about last week? Well, nothing is secure. Last weekend, violence unfolded in our former house that is beyond what’s mine to tell today. We have since been grappling with multiple potentialities - either we face possible legal and entirely immediate financial ramifications for trying to buy the perpetrator of the violence out of the lease, or she moves in anyway, with one roommate having bailed in the interim, and we, the three of us already on the property (including, besides me, a mother and six year old child), all make plans to leave. Which in fact, still leaves a shortfall.

I have not unpacked anything all week. We have been living in shock, in a state of suspended animation and uncertainty. The dominating characteristics of the person whose actions began this have continued to dominate us in the fallout zone. I don’t know how to arrest this. Not unless, and until, I leave.

The financial gap is real and immediate. The landlord cannot cover it. There is terror in the field, and I am navigating a plethora of deep-seated trauma responses around my own safety, viability, and home. Not to mention the incessant invitation to second-guess and berate myself for being in this situation in the first place. I see my part in it. I understand that in some way, beyond what I can yet fathom, I signed up for and created this.

And at the same time, this is not my property to save. I cannot take the dwindling funds that I have set aside to live on, carefully, while I rebuild my life and launch new business ventures, and sink them all into a property that isn’t even mine. I already paid double rent for June to pull off this move. This is not my hill to die on.

The line is constantly shifting. The line is hard to see, let alone hold. It may cost us all our home, and the landlord, this land. I am working hard so that it doesn’t cost me my sanity, too. This moment may be groundless, but I need my mental ground.

Going into this move, I had a personal strategy around handling one of the people in this constellation - I decided that if certain questionable actions, say, of manipulation or control or abusive speech, weren’t directed specifically at me, then I would extend the benefit of the doubt. I would watch the others involved - (roommates and former roommates from the other house) - how they acted and reacted, and not draw premature conclusions about anyone. I was new to this village, to this social system. I had my reservations - I voiced them months ago to a friend, I was reminded yesterday - but I decided I would allow for the possibility of a healthier pattern to emerge in this person’s interactions with me.

It turns out, I drew that line in the wrong place. Very wrong. And in so doing, I contributed to the compromise of my own integrity and safety, as well as that of others. Extending the benefit of the doubt did not protect me. It did not protect any of us.

After the decisive and damaging events last Saturday night, I stepped out with fierce love and clarity to correct this. I made a decision not to be loyal to the dysfunctional structures I found around me. So yes, some protective and collective actions were attempted. But the fallout and costs, both emotional and financial, are immediate, real, and still evolving, and I don’t yet know how I will handle them all. I am reckoning with remorse that it took a dramatic eruption for me to step off the sidelines, disrupt an abusive situation and draw a new line. In a way, we (me, the other roommates) all dodged a bullet. And yet, the costs may still be too high.

So that’s one piece. External, material, logistic. Internal, confronting, real.

Brass tacks, I am leaving this morning for a work trip, and when I come back, it will already be July. I can pay July’s rent (my own share, not the whole house) and just plan to move out when I return. I can get new boxes and I can spend the holiday weekend - my birthday weekend - packing up yet again. That doesn’t save anybody. Not me, not the landlord or the land, not the mother and young child that moved here with me and are now planning to leave the land immediately, to God-knows-where, to avoid exposing themselves to the person who is still, by large measure, acting out. But again, like a mantra that I have to keep repeating to myself (mantra means, by the way, that which protects the mind) - I’m not sure this situation is mine to save.

At the moment, I sure don’t feel like I have another move in me. At the moment, it feels like we’ve all been through a war. More precisely, a series of losing battles, in a war of attrition, with no visible purpose or end. No purpose, that is, except for strengthening my boundaries, my bottom lines, my ability to up-level my vision.

Theoretically, I can rise to this occasion. And theoretically, I’m not giving up. In other words, I’m still working on the base assumption that I will survive this next chapter.

So while having the nitty gritty conversations with others, navigating a constantly shifting landscape, internally, I am recalibrating my bottom lines. Recognizing that “I can handle this [situation/behavior/fill-in-the-blank]” is no longer an acceptable response to a red flag. That “tolerable” is no longer the baseline for whether a situation is worth entering into, or staying in. My system knows how to handle tolerable, my system knows how to handle compromise. I am having to retrain my system to learn how to function in vision, in love, in going for what I truly want - and not what I am willing to settle for. I am having to set boundaries with people who have a clear history of violence and no evidence of understanding, let alone respecting, boundaries. It is an impossible task. I pray that I can lift out of here before more things - before I - fall apart.

And, simultaneously, I am asking myself, in quiet despair, when I will reach the bottom? Are we there yet? Asking myself, was this worth it? My ex-partner sent me an email the other day. I only saw it yesterday - thanks to all this chaos, I have been utterly failing at managing any normal parts of daily life - telling me that she can’t heal while she still holds out hope for repair between us, doing me the courtesy of letting me know that she is blocking me to focus on herself. That if I do reach out, she will decisively not be on the other end. I honor this. I respect this. And yet, of course, I ask - was this worth it, getting off my medications? Leaving our home? Is this, what we each are facing now, “better”? Why am I here, how did my best actions and best thinking get me here? I know these are the “wrong” questions, but they are rising. I see them.

The spirit of suicide is rising too. Trying to find a foothold in this crisis to enter in. I broke my contract with the spirit of suicide in December. Literally wrote up the contract that I felt it held over me, that we’d entered into so early in my life - I started carrying a pocketknife around when I was nine years old, “just in case” - and I destroyed it. Scribbled it out, rendered it null and void. Prayed over it, handed it back, then tore and burned it up. It was a liberating ritual to enact. It felt decisive. And that spirit hasn’t haunted me much, since then. Not at all, in fact. But in the last couple of days, I have caught glimpses of it creeping back around. The catastrophe-thinking. The dead-end, negative-fantasy, future-tripping ideas - to sell everything, burn everything, throw it all out or simply just walk away from it all and just… disappear. Just ‘get out of here,’ away from these people, away from this whole situation, get out to where your death won’t hurt anybody (quite so much) and then, shut it all down. As if there’s a place I can go where my death wouldn’t hurt anyone. As if death is any kind of answer.

I am not ideating. I am not planning. I am not acting on any of these thoughts. But I am naming them, inviting them into the light, into their true nature, where we, together, can see them, and witness them, and let this collective seeing take their power away.

Besides which, didn’t I just release “all” my remaining ghosts a few weeks ago? Didn’t I do that work in ceremony and afterwards, paint that picture and enact that cleansing? Well yes, I suppose - I released all the ghosts I had access to then. Apparently there are still some more haunted old patterns rattling around in here, begging to be let out, to be pacified or transformed even more. The work continues. And continues. And continues. I am a light worker, which means, I am a shadow worker. I carry heavy medicine. I am learning how to wield it.

Also, I am a creator. And I know that suicide is not a creative approach. Negativity, in any form, is simply not creative. It’s actually pretty boring. Predictable. Stale. And I know these thoughts, these ideas rising, they’re not “me.” I know suicide is no solution. And solution isn’t even the goal anyway - acting towards a clear vision, taking actions coming from love, regardless of present circumstances, is! But I am naming this. Because that’s why I started this blog. To share this journey, unflinchingly. And I have been walking through all this transition, heartbreak, grief, groundlessness, uncertainty, recalibration, (all this BEFRE the week of fallout from literal violence), for months now, without my medications. And the triggers have been mounting. And the training wheels are off. And I am stable and clear, despite and amidst it all. Fiercely loyal to my true nature. Standing my groundless ground.

My Psalms maps are hanging on the wall before me, here in this new studio space that I may never create in. That won’t get be mine for very long at all. Reminding me to praise, to sing from the deepest place within me. Reminding me to find the medicine in everything. Where is the medicine in this moment? Is it in the tobacco that I have been smoking since Saturday night, telling myself, “at least I’m not picking up?” Is it in the moments of incredible community connection with the people I find myself navigating this moment with, people who are showing up calm, and spacious, and full of grace, even while we all face these triggers, these traumas, this unknown? Is it in the mirror I gaze into when I speak once again to the person whose violent actions set this whole cascade of collapse into motion?

By the way, do you know how existentially and literally disorienting it is to be nearly 46 years old and navigating a critical moment like this entirely with a group of humans that I have NO history with, all of whom I’ve just met within the last three months? It’s surreal. Completely surreal. I am working hard to not make story about this. To simply stay in the present moment. Reminding myself, as the Psalms map says, that the present moment is God’s house.

Above my little altar hangs a picture that I drew of my root teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, of when he was a boy. It includes a line of a teaching - there IS no house. This is a teaching about the constructs we create, the illusion of ‘reality’ and ‘self’ that we take as so real, when the only real consistent thing there is here - callback to last week’s post - is impermanence.

(Sogyal Rinpoche as a boy. digital drawing. 2021)

Can I rest in this space, where there IS no house? And can that “no-house” BE God’s house?

I am not in danger. I am not desperately trying to get back in to see my nurse psychiatrist. I am not anxiously trying to find which as-of-yet-unpacked-box might contain any remnants of my old medications. I can watch my thoughts and feelings arise, and name them, and welcome them, and not be too hijacked for them, for too long. This is not a suicide note. It is not even a cry for help. It is simply a ship’s log, written from the middle of a turbulent passage, not sure even, if the destination is known.

What I do know is that this is not the destination. Once again, this house is not my home.

What I also suspect, for better or for worse, is that there isn’t even a destination. There is no finish line. I do not have to know what that means for me, big picture. Not now. But I do know that this is not the place to draw conclusions from. This is not the place to make life decisions from. This is a place to keep seeking choice, and guidance, and right action. To keep setting boundaries, as often as it takes. To support my own well-being, as best as I can, moment by moment. To stay here. To stay alive.

Unpack this box? Now? Okay. Does it need to be sorted? No? Just unpack it. Sort items later. Okay. Proceed.

I unpack the box, then check in again. “What am I doing now? Am I singing, praying, writing?” Okay, “writing.” Let’s begin…

Yesterday I had a short hakomi session, the somatic modality I’ve been working with since I first started tapering off my meds. One part of it reminded me of a tool I’d learned on my silent retreat back in January: a practice of welcoming whatever is arising, fully, without any attempt to manipulate or manage or change. The welcoming, the presence, the bearing witness, in itself, loosens things.

Anxiety? You are welcome here. Groundlessness? You are welcome too. Fear and catastrophizing? You too, come on in. My bodily sense of having withdrawn, from the ground up, having retracted my tender roots back into my feet? The way that feeling results in a vague hovering-just-above-the-ground sensation of guardedness and tepid self-protection? Welcome. You are welcome here. Welcome home.

There’s some deep reparenting work to be done in this moment, and I’m. Doing. It. I keep reminding myself: this is not a detour. This IS the path. This IS the work. But I’m disoriented, and I keep having to talk myself down from a state of overwhelm. I keep having to interrupt the habit of taking the feelings or sensations that arise, and then making meaning of them - making story. Attaching significance to them beyond the mere noticing. Which is to say, in other words, the habit of negative fantasy. The habit of writing fiction (and believing it).

All story is fiction, in the end, isn’t it? I mean, even if it “happened” - the moment we start the retelling, it’s already changing, and changing us. Yesterday I was in a recovery meeting and the topic was ‘honesty.’ The most honest thing I can say right now is that I keep catching my brain doing a thing it’s really good at - looking for a problem to solve.

The other most honest thing I can say right now is, I am in no shape to be writing this. Trying to be articulate, cogent, to string thoughts together into a coherent narrative when what I really need most of all is stillness and enough emotional space and unstructured time for big fat tears to come squirting out my eyeballs. I need to be letting myself just feel, without trying to do anything with it, or about it. But instead I keep trying to say something, just because I’ve created this structure in which my blog posts go live every Friday morning. And right now, it’s Thursday night.

The boxes that are left to unpack are boxes that were packed up in a hurry in my old house. They’ve been sealed for almost two months now, and each one that I open brings with it fresh waves of grief and loss and remembrance. There’s a heart-wrenching finality, a weight, to have “arrived” here at this house-that-I-can-stay-at-that-is-not-yet-my-home.

It’s making me sick to my stomach. I desperately want a state change, and yet, the work is to welcome all this in. Nausea, you are welcome here. Hurt, scared little girl, you are welcome here. Longing feeling to pick up the phone and call my ex as if she’d answer and reassure me somehow, you are welcome here. And on. And on. And on. Take a deep breath. Feel my body in its seat. Make another outreach phone call. Have another sip of water…

It feels like trip-sitting, only the person I’m trip-sitting for is… me.

I notice the inclination to say something clever. I notice the inclination to say “fuck it” and just let tomorrow morning come and go and not even remark upon the absence of a post. I notice that I haven’t thought about dinner yet. I notice how ungrounded it feels to be surrounded by people, none of whom I have known longer than three months. Aside from the things I am unpacking, which are all still off-gassing their own ghosts from the past, everything around me is new.

“New” is not exciting right now. It is daunting. I painted my new studio this week. My very own studio, just like that choice I made every day for the past year. I didn’t want to paint it, but the walls were a mess. It’s much better now. That’s a relief, and yet, all I still seem to do is break down and cry. I feel like I’m back in some much earlier phase of sobriety again, where it takes all my resources and tools to make it through a simple day, and I end up exhausted without having even touched my to-do list. But this is not early sobriety. This is not a crisis, and this is not a detour. I’m waking up. I’m taking responsibility. I AM actually managing that to-do-list pretty well, and being realistic about what I can accomplish, and being kind to myself about what can wait. I’m putting one foot in front of the other on behalf of all of us. All of my parts, and all of you, whoever you are, fellow sentient beings who also probably need to do some waking up (just taking a wild guess here that I’m not alone). I’m charting a new course. I’m wayfinding towards freedom…

Now look - I’m giving myself a pep talk. Ugh.

Is this long enough yet?, a voice asks.

Have you even said anything you wanted to say? I don’t think so. No. And, No.

But I’m posting this anyway. Even though it’s not anything near what I wanted to write. Because deciding to go dark for the week is just an invitation to make excuses next week, and the week afterwards, too. I already have adequate reasons why it will be hard to get those posts done on time. And that’s a slippery slope, especially for an all-or-nothing addict mind like mine. It’s like that funny saying I heard once in AA, how does it go? “No matter how far down the road you’ve gone, you’re still just one step away from the gutter.”

So I’m not just “skipping this week.” I’m saying all this dumb stuff instead, without any time or space to let it breathe or edit it, and then I’m going to make some dinner and feed myself and after that, if all I’m good for is another good cry, then that’s what I’ll do. Go cry, and enjoy it. That’s what Rinpoche would tell me to do. You want to be sad, that’s fine - then at least enjoy the sadness!

Because I’m raw. I’m split open, and I feel like hell. But I’m loving myself, actively. My self-talk is supportive. I took a break from all my meetings and unpacking and admin today to take myself to the river and have a little swim. And I am giving myself unconditional positive regard. And that, just that on its own, is a bloody miracle. So all of this together? It means I’m doing “great.” Great. This is great.

A year ago, my partner and I were at an incredible community gathering in Ashland, OR called Peace Village Music Festival. It was a highlight of the year for us both. A highlight of all our years, even. We first fell in love dancing, and I still don’t think I ever saw her smile in everyday life the way she’d smile on a dance floor. I think all this spring, we both held out a thin hope that somehow we could have gotten back there, together again, this year. But that is not what’s happening. Peace Village is next weekend. I will be driving to the Bay, for some really cool queer Jewish work actually. I will probably listen to some of the music I discovered at Peace Village while I drive. I will probably cry while I drive. That is all okay.

Feelings, unfelt, they stick around. They earn interest. They’re harder to deal with later. I’d rather let them course through me and be released in real time. Now that I know how to feel them without having to believe them.

This weekend is a send-off party at my new-old-house. The one I’ve barely lived in for 90 days. The one where I met the roommates that I’m moving into my new house with now. Now I have to pack an overnight bag to go back there. To be sociable. To help pack up the rest of the communally-used things. I’m hoping to share some music of my own at some point, if the moment presents itself. Bring my humble medicine to this tiny corner of the world, broken open as I am, as we all are. And if tears come when I sing, let them come. This may be final, but it’s not permanent. Impermanence is the only thing that’s not changing.

Legend has it, King Solomon had a ring that was engraved with a saying that was always true. A saying that would make a sad man happy, and a happy man sad. I think that particularly spicy combo of happy-sad is pretty close to the nature of reality, actually. To what the Tibetan Buddhists would call absolute bodhichitta, or even, amazingly, dakini bliss1. It’s vulnerability without armor. It’s broken-heartedness and willingness and even gratitude, all at the same time. It’s walls down and ‘there is no house’ and thus, you are just another me and therefore I have nothing to fear from you. I love you, even while my heart breaks. It’s -

Gam zeh ya’avor. גם זה יעבור

This too shall pass.

(image: Intention Ascends. May 2026. acrylic paint and marker on kraft paper. 48” x 28”)

“Do you consider yourself a psalmist?,” Rena Yehuda said to me the other day in our end-of-semester madrich discussion (madrich is Hebrew for ‘guide’ or ‘instructor’) for my Judaism Unbound certificate program in unbound Judaism.

I paused.

It’s been a few years now, since I studied the Psalms in a Christian context, yet the word still rang out with certain cloying undertones of conformity and oppression to my ears. This, despite my having spent my entire spring studying and praying with the Psalms in a Jewish container, working with them both in their original Hebrew and in fresh musical and English translation by the incredible Rabbi Shefa Gold. Shefa has committed her life to unlocking the magic and medicine of spiritual music, and in addition to countless Hallelujahs, she has composed a chant for every single Hebrew psalm. Shefa was fond of reminding us in class that the Psalms were never meant to just be ‘studied’ in a book, merely read silently or even discussed aloud. They were meant to be sung and danced. They were always, from the very beginning, meant to be sung and danced! They were - they ARE - prayers that are meant to move us - somatically, vibrationally - into alignment with the Divine.

Music has always been one of my own ways into Divine communion. And I am a composer and carrier of sacred songs. Still, my gut did a little flip. A psalmist? Me?

To check myself, I looked up the word, eager to find my way to a cleaner emotional response. Not to dismiss the question in a knee-jerk way, but to liberate myself from any lurking irrational or unconscious trigger-happy reactions within. To face whatever shadows (or ghosts! Because I am not a haunted house!) of religious trauma might still be seeking healing in me. Especially in the aftermath of my not-too-distant “year as an evangelical Christian,” as one friend of mine likes to call that particular chapter of my recovery journey.1

I dug into the meaning of the word, seeking to find a more real answer.

Psalmist - a writer or composer of psalms, that is, sacred songs or poems of praise. In modern (mostly Christian) settings, the word is also used to refer to one who leads such songs in worship or private devotional space, whether they’re the composer of them or not. One site I found said “a psalmist carries a heart that is ever-ready to respond to God’s call for a relationship.” I like that.

Psalms, in Hebrew, is Tehillim (תהילים), which means “praises.” We praise when we intercede. We praise when we lament. We praise when we supplicate or grieve. We praise when we thank, exalt and revel. We praise when we comfort and encourage.2 In one way or another, all forms of prayer, all forms of communion, no matter what else they may be doing, they are also a form of praise. There is some degree of recognizing the nature of reality, of absolute reality, beyond whatever is happening here-and-now, and knowing, at the heart of it, that it is good.

So yes. I guess I do consider myself a psalmist. I write songs. More recently, I would say rather, I catch songs, I receive them. I listen out for them and attune to them and prepare myself for them. I intend for them to arrive and then I drop everything and pay attention when they do. And then, I carry them like medicine, for they are medicine to me, and to those I share them with. They are sacred, and I assume a sacred responsibility in carrying them and sharing them. Especially the more recent ones, which have, some of them, fewer and fewer words - some of them even true niggunim, completely wordless melodies of Hebrew prayer, for isn’t it true, that God doesn’t need our words to understand us! - I consider these ones, of them all, to be particularly potent forms of sacred sound medicine.

(image: Unlocking the Psalms. June 2026. acrylic paint & marker on kraft paper. 48” x 28”)

So as not to too wildly depart from last week’s recounting of my not-haunted-housedness, I will offer this bridge - which is that I believe that my own psalmistry transcends music. I see my visual arts, my soul scribing, as an aspect of my psalmistry too. An aspect of the sacred, vibrational work that I am here to do. For me, soul scribing3 is a divinatory practice of presencing and attuning - both to the Divine in its absolute sense, AND what wants to surface from within me, in a way that I can learn from, and cohere, and grow. Soul scribing is psalmistry. Creating something sacred, something moving, as a form of praise and insight. Of revelation.

Last Saturday evening I had the opportunity to do some live artwork at a small gallery in Truckee (9848 Gallery at the Truckee Artist Lofts), where my Nettle is Metal pieces were on display. I had some jumping off ideas to work with - not in the form of images, but phrases that were still trying to unfold themselves in the wake of my post-ceremony spaceship landing endeavors of the past week. The first phrase was “put your head in the mouth of the house.” An act that I still held tension around. The second was, “I am not a haunted house.” A higher agreement that I was still growing into believing.

(image: our 1820 farmhouse. Image from Zillow.com)

I began by drawing my childhood house itself. Not only as I remember it, but literally as it still appears today. There it still is - flat-faced, stoic, severe. White plank siding with heavy black trim, black roof, black shutters. In the picture, I left off one of the three front windows on the first floor, because I needed more room to draw the mouth - the door - of the house. The door today is green. Thirty years ago, our door had been red. In my image, that red door became the thick, reaching tongue, protruding past the golden fangs of the house’s mouth. I drew myself reaching towards a tooth, stuffed animal in my hand, steeling myself to climb in.

(image: Mouth of the House. June 2026. acrylic paint & marker on kraft paper. 48” x 28”)

In drawing the mouth, and then me, it occurred to me that the fangs actually continued beyond the house. Making an arched pathway, an approach, of sorts. And as I added more of them, stretching outwards from the front door, the next phrase called to be drawn in, and I began drawing myself yet again, only this time, peeling back the walls of my own chest to peer inside. I didn’t know what I would find there. In this “I am not a haunted house” space.

It turned out that my insides were something of a mirror image of the house’s tongue. One friend said to me, reflecting on this afterwards, “it’s like you lost your heart, when you went into that house, and now you have it back.”

I also drew the ghosts, the haunting spirits, leaving me. Two of them, their terrifying eyes, lost and bewildered, so large and desperate inside their giant hungry-ghost-like heads. Their long, tapered bodies ended in jagged roots, which felt like a good representation of how they were detaching from me, something like the opposite of wisdom teeth. Releasing their grips, floating free. Interestingly, when I look at this now, I see that I drew myself here without a mouth, which is very, very rare. So rare as to perhaps not have happened before in all the drawings of myself that I can remember. So this image is a nonverbal - preverbal, even - moment of reckoning. Of reconciliation.

And then there’s my landing place. My nettle throne. The fangs, now transformed, become the protective pillars of my royal nettle seat. The stinging spines of the nettle, my cushion, my place of rest. In the work I did in ceremony, I sent nettle in after me, reclaiming the house even after I’d completed my tour, room to room. She is still in there when I visualize it now, growing wild throughout the house, overtaking and filling every room, energetically cleansing it all with the tingly power of her green electric life force. The work continues, and yet, it is also done.

The next day, a friend mentioned to me that she’d found a patch of nettle along the Truckee River, and we journeyed there together. It’s grown waist-high now, which is to say, impenetrable to any ordinary human, I would say. The stings were big enough to see the tiny sacs of nettle venom resting at their base. We stripped down to our underwear and with delight, harvested and beat ourselves with the stinging branches. The tingling intensified all night, lasting far into the next day, and even the next. Cold plunging in the river afterwards, I felt completely embodied, electrified, grounded, revitalized. “Ceremonia,” I said, “is complete.”

Living in this way, making ritual out of daily life, IS the path of being a psalmist, to me. It’s not just about the songs I compose that I can remember. It’s not just about the soul scribing when I draw and write. It’s about singing spontaneously, as Milarepa did, letting realization or longing or devotion or whatever wants and needs to pour through, to pour through me. It is about being a channel for the Divine, a channel for the song. And sometimes the song is in music. And sometimes the song is in ink. And sometimes the song is in the gleeful laughter that comes when one is beating oneself with stinging nettles, beating oneself senseless, offering myself to the moment in prayer in the most exhilarating and delightful way.

If this isn’t enough magic and medicine of the Psalms for you, my final presentation for my semester of Judaism Unbound learning is a twenty-five minute video where I share a couple of my new niggunim and walk through the insights captured in the two Psalms maps that I shared above. Write to me, if you want to see it. There’s plenty enough medicine to go around.

The truth is, the most loving thing I can do right now is wait. Is be. Be still, and be slow, and let the healing that is happening keep happening. Last weekend, for three nights, I participated in deep psychic surgery on myself, receiving the nearly incapacitating ministrations of the medicine. We did soul retrieval. We did parts work. And together, we opened a portal into seven years of my childhood that I have kept, for nearly thirty years, under close lock and key. Seven years and an entire home that I have specifically and willfully avoided re-entering, whether in real life, in my imagination, or in memory. This tenderness, now? This is the aftercare.

The summer I turned nine, my family moved into a haunted house. This weekend I discovered the ways that, despite all the work I have done, it was haunting me, still.

And in the dismay of that insight - that oversight, even, I would say - I was guided by, and followed in the footprints of, the great Tibetan saint Milarepa. Living alone in caves, on high mountain tops, he subsisted on nettles (!!!), purifying the karma of his past, and his whole family line, all the while composing great and spontaneous songs of realization. Alongside me for the past several weeks, Mila guided me throughout my entire dieta, inspiring my prayers, my songs, my artwork (Nettle is Metal is an homage to the oft-depicted posture of Milarepa, in fact, listening out, I would imagine, for his great songs). No wonder he would appear to me in ceremony too. More and more, despite the ten centuries between us, he is becoming a root teacher to me. A forceful guide.

(image: Nettle is Metal. May 2026. acrylic paint on kraft paper, 48” x 28”)

When Mila returned to his cave one day, the story goes, it was filled with demons. Wrathfully, he drew himself up and attempted to expel them. To scare them away, to chase them out. They were utterly unmoved.

He then attempted another approach. Teaching them the dharma, sharing his heart teachings, he must have hoped it would soften them somewhat. Have some discernible impact on their countenance or their presence. But alas, it had none.

Failing that, he tried again, hoping yet to make peace with them. “Okay,” he reasoned, “it seems we’re cohabitating now. I accept that. So, what might you have to teach me?” Humbling himself to them in this way, he found that most, but not all of them, disappeared. But the lead demon, the fiercest, largest, most terrifying demon? She - it’s always been a ‘she’ in my mind (thanks, Mom?) - remained.

This is where the fullness of surrender comes in. As the memory of Milarepa’s story flooded back through me, I felt my heart sink. Because antidotes were not how he overcame the demons. Wrath didn’t work. Generosity and loving-kindness didn’t work. Even a truce didn’t fully work. Skillful means of any dualistic kind were not his path to victory. What Milarepa ultimately did was to offer himself to the lead demon, placing his head directly into her fanged and gruesome mouth. Only then did she disappear.

“Put your head in the mouth of the house,” I heard Mila - the medicine - say.

And so I did.

Now comes the aftercare.

My system is exhausted. Tears are coming easily. I am grateful to be eating more ‘normal’ food again, but my body is overwhelmed by digesting it. I am grateful that I don’t have many external obligations on my plate this week. That I can give myself the time and space and care to feel into what I need, and gingerly, tenderly walk through this moment with loving-kindness. But my spirit is weary, daunted by the magnitude of the task. I am reminding myself that if I hadn’t prepared the ground so well, I wouldn’t have been able to go into that darkness, to open the shadow work that I did. I am reminding myself of what an accomplishment this ceremony was. That it’s been well-accomplished even in the ongoing tenderness of this moment. That just because I came out of the ceremony with the clear sense that the work is not yet done, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t also done extraordinarily well.

Yesterday I woke up with a small glimmer of enthusiasm for the day. It didn’t stick. Today, I didn’t feel it at all. This is all okay.

I am touching into some deep, deep wounds here. The origins of my fear - of madness, of ‘going crazy,’ of being out of control, lacking agency and voice? The years of habitual perception that my own body and mind are not a safe place to live, that ingrained sense of not belonging anywhere, of lacking a safe home of any kind? These fears have been laying in wait, like demons, gaining strength through my very avoidance of them, running riot in that haunted house that unbeknownst to me, I was still carrying inside. Fears, in the ghosts that awaited our arrival, so many years ago. Fears, in our own ghosts that we brought into the house with us when we came.

Next week I will begin moving into a new house. A good house. A house that has already been teaching me, priming me, inviting me to face these old fears down, head on. And so my work now, my living amends, is to hold myself well through these transitions, outer, inner, and secret. To lovingly keep reparenting myself, moving into this new home in the caring and protected ways that my childhood move lacked. To involve and include and enroll my younger parts, giving them voice and agency and choice. Reassuring them that if we don’t like it there, we can leave. Reassuring them that I will keep them safe.

So, let the shadow work begin. Rather, let the shadow work continue. I am not here to banish these feelings, I am not here to banish these demons. For as long as it takes, I will put my head into the mouth of the house. I do not need to reject or manipulate my fears. I do not need to try and change these feelings into anything else more palatable, more desirable, or more easy. I am here for the work. I am here for the healing. Today, it doesn’t feel “good.” But what is “good?” I’ll tell you what is good. That I am not a haunted house. And it is not the house’s fault.

(image: Bill Wilson in Lake Tahoe. Dec 2021. digital illustration)

As of the day this post goes live, I have been off my psychiatric medications for six months. Six months, and I am experiencing life beyond my wildest dreams.

Let me explain.

When people ask me how I am lately, I find myself qualifying the response. I’m well, “despite all the upheaval.” Or, “there’s a lot that’s still up in the air, but I’m feeling really good.” Qualifying my wellbeing like this is worth interrogating on its own. Why undercut myself like this at all? I can see the scared, youngish part, just wriggling around under the surface here, worrying that if I were so bold as to declare this experiment a success, that something bad might happen. Oh Yes. I see you, little fear. I see you, and I honor you. And you’re welcome to be here, and you don’t have to change until and unless you’re readyto. But you also don’t get to run the show anymore.

Because you know how I am, really? Surfing the waves of all the changes and uncertainties of life all around me, from micro to macro, terror to beauty, grief to joy, birth to death? I’m best ever. Best. Ever.

I am shy of making massive declarative statements about myself like this. I’ve made lots of them over the years, and often times, while momentarily revelatory, they aren’t that true. They don’t stand the test of time. But this is true, and worth saying out loud. Not to convince, not to crow. Simply to say it: I have never been as sober and stable as I am today. And today. And today. And for many days now, all in a row. Stable when up, stable when down. Stable when stable. It is a miracle.

And so just for today, I want to own that.

To harvest the creation of these last many, many months, which ran the gamut from defending my need for the drugs in the first place, to utter despair at my crippled reliance on them and my ongoing experience of spiritual castration and alienation from Source, to an exploration into what it might look like to try and stop them again. Then, to a galvanized and yet still terrifying decision to actually put them down. On into the destabilizing and discomfiting months of the tapering, and the early periods of withdrawal, in which I was unable to trust a single thing I might think or feel. Onwards, through the earlier months of having released the meds, detoxifying my body and soul, becoming an infant again, emotionally and spiritually speaking. Mothering myself. Learning to crawl. To rebuild my altar. To pray in a new way. To rely on a new program. And then, leaving my home, navigating, in a way that I am unashamed of, in a way that was nearly as clean as I could hope for, the wreckage of my relationship ending. Embarking on a journey of returning to equilibrium within myself, on my own terms, in each sovereign-yet-temporary space that I have inhabited since. Even as I now ready myself to move house, yet again.

And in this time, what else have I created? Health, well-being. Deep confidence and equanimity. New songs. New paintings. New home(s). New experiences, and friends and community. New work, and new work opportunities. Waking up in the mornings, naturally clear. Less and less with that familiar heaviness and the need to meticulously choreograph my way ‘out ahead of the wave’ to start my day, ‘or else…’. Even less grief, as time goes on. And more and more, I am simply waking up - sometimes quite early (sometimes too early!) - excited to be alive.

I should mention too, that when I began the taper off these medications, I also put down caffeine. A drug that is so ubiquitous in our society that we rarely (aside from Michael Pollen’s brilliant coverage of it in This Is Your Mind On Plants) stop to acknowledge its insidious hold on us. So now, when I wake up with the morning light (which is earlier and earlier here, as summer solstice approaches), I am simply, well, awake.

I still have to be careful to enter the day slowly. Prolong the quiet space, don’t get discursive or busy too fast. Stay silent. Place my mind with intention. Make my prayers, make choices. Be ‘alert, alert, yet relax, relax,’ as my root teacher would say. Greet the sun, boil water, and make it to my meditation cushion at least for a bit. Don’t turn on the phone. Don’t let the mindhorses out of the stables too soon, because they’ll gallop away full speed the moment I let them go, and then it’s hard to regain that fresh spaciousness again, all day. But even then, even if I do get pulled into action or reaction or distraction faster than I mean to, I recalibrate somewhat. I rebalance. And I begin again.

What I mean to say is, my energy has never been more balanced and stable. Spacious and clear. Consistent and clean. Even when things are hard.

This enthusiasm for life has never been a norm for me. Not without desperation mixed in. Not without fear. Not without the futile, hidden compulsion to get out from under the crashing wave, or worse yet, the lurking undertow. No, this? This is new. I do not take it for granted. And I also allow myself to fully receive it. To acknowledge its magic. To welcome it in. This. Is. New.

I am re-working my choices right now. The deliberate set of carefully crafted choices that I start my day with. The old set has been retired, the new set is still emerging. So I’m in the interstitial, liminal space of my own core creative structures. A creative bardo of becoming. I am also deep in a plant dieta, a home retreat of clearing and cleansing. Studying with nettle, taking in her medicine and teachings, and preparing for ceremony. In a way, this whole six-plus months has been a ceremony. Life itself is the ceremony. The real ceremony starts when the ceremony ends. Be still! Listen!

(image: Nettle is Metal. May 2026. acrylic paint on kraft paper, 48” x 28”)

Gratefulness has never been a go-to emotional state for me. I have bristled at the suggestion to cultivate it. The first time a fellow member of AA told me to write a gratitude list, I literally cursed her out. But independent of circumstances, without my bidding, it is starting, uninvited, like grasses after a rain, to spring up. And I am letting it.

Last weekend was Shavuot, the Jewish holiday of revelation (and traditionally, though none for me this year, cheesecake). In which being a nerd and an autodidact and an outlier all immediately qualify you for belonging, and staying up for 24 hours straight studying torah with friends is absolutely the best thing ever to do. This Shavuot, in addition to studying for fifteen hours online with Judaism Unbound, I channeled three paintings and caught one song. I am frankly still recovering from the sheer amount of insight and power that was coursing through me in those two days. All without the caffeine or the cheesecake. Because my fuel comes from a higher source now. I am, as I first drew in the image of Bill Wilson, founder of AA, that appears at the top of this post, Higher-Powered.

(image: revelation. May 2026. acrylic paint on kraft paper, 28” x 48”)

Why am I relaying this story of one week in May with such a painstaking level of detail? Because I have an idea. A felt sense. An intuitive gnawing… a knowing… that tells me there’s some value in this for others.

So this is me, attempting to make real-time healing and transformation wholly transparent - pulling back the curtain and saying look, this is how it can be done. It doesn’t (have to) take medication. It takes the right tools: discipline and willingness and creativity and a sound structure of self-love…

It was suggested to me that I take Dad along in the car with me on the road trip, energetically speaking. Let him ride shotgun. Play some music we’d both like. Talk to him, even let him talk back. Imagine having the him-and-me time that we hadn’t had in so long. Imagine him-and-me time like maybe we’ve never had. Imagine him getting to see the world again through human eyes, something he hasn’t done in ten years, at least not in a form I would recognize. Imagine him seeing through my eyes. Imagine how fun and funny this could be.

We had a great drive. It was a perfect spring day and we wound our way along the Yuba River for hours. Blasting Melissa Etheridge’s latest live album, because I still remember how impressed he was by her, when he took me to her concert once when I was younger. He’d thought he was just doing me a solid by taking me to the show. Being a ‘good dad.’ He didn’t expect to be so blown away by her consummate rock and roll prowess. But he was. And I just couldn’t stomach any of the stuff I know he used to listen to. The Band. Joni Mitchell. Cat Stevens. That music is all still so tinged with loss. And my grief playlist had been resoundingly vetoed. So there we were, stereo blasting, and while I drove, I talked. Laid into him a bit, even. His energy felt receptive, and occasionally he chimed in with an update or a point of view, too.

When we got to Sierraville, I stopped for lunch, even though I had plenty of food with me. I just liked the idea of going out to eat with dad again. In college, he’d visit me and take me out to this amazing lesbian-run vegetarian cafe in Rochester, NY. Slice of Life. Besides, I knew I wasn’t going to keep him at my side all day at the hot springs, us being naked and all.

But I couldn’t have ever imagined what was to come. The rest of the day unfolded in a series of increasingly profound encounters, all involving older men. Friendly men, soft-spoken men, with clean, safe energy, who were all pretty much right around my father’s age - that is, if he’d still been alive. The first two were in the meditation pool with me. They’d been bike-packing, on the trail for eight days riding down from Klamath Falls. We traded numbers. I’ll pick their brain for tips for my own cycling adventure. Or maybe join them next year. Wouldn’t that be fun?

When I left that pool and was alone again, I was hit by a disorienting wave of grief. The realization that I’d been hanging out with guys who were basically examples of what my dad could have been, had he gotten healthier, freed himself from that marriage, stayed alive - it just blindsided me. I’m used to these waves of grief. No longer confused, I recognize them immediately for what they are. My stomach drops, and I feel like I’m about to get sucked underwater. I talk myself through them, more gently than I used to. I soothe myself. Breathe. I use tools.

In this case, I thought to look for a recovery meeting, so I pulled out my phone and jumped on zoom. Forty-five minutes later, I was grounded again, centered in the remembrance and experience that I am never alone. The task of focusing on something outside of myself, of being present to others, usually distracts me from my own turbulence long enough for things to settle. This is pretty much true even if nothing I hear feels like it’s sinking in. I shared, too, which is part of my practice not only of accountability and learning to name my emotions in real time, but also an offering of my own experience as service to others. Making every action an act of love.

Centered again, I was primed for the next encounter. A man and his partner were walking by, and he remarked on my ukelele case, which I’d just taken out to play. “Is that a violin?,” he asked, and a conversation began. About playing music, and music training, and his being a dad, and his three adult daughters, and one of them learning to play his classical guitar, and it was easy and sweet and somehow I was moved to share what day it was. I said “this is going to be a vulnerable share, but today’s the tenth anniversary of my dad’s suicide.” The conversation deepened. Before I knew it, I was invited to join a song circle that was happening right then in the hot springs lodge, and there I was again, instantly folded back into another formation of loving, in-person community.

The song circle was delightful and rich. Just the kind of spontaneous synergy that happens when people meet with open hearts and a desire to nourish and be nourished, together. We made music, traded stories, and soaked in the playful ease of the present moment.

After that, and a very late dinner, I was just trying to decide it if it was time for bed or if I could rally myself for a late night soaking session, when a fourth man invited me to sit down and chat. I’d connected with him during our arrivals that afternoon because I’d recognized him from MANNA Festival, the Jewish pilgrimage journey I’d been on four weeks before. He had been introduced in that setting as an elder, and while our encounters there were brief, I was impressed by his soft and gentle energy, the kindness in his eyes. Here we go again, I thought, and I sat down.

I didn’t know what I was in for. I couldn’t have designed it this well, even if I’d wanted to.

Here was a living human, an older, male human, who had, it turns out, literally been training in elderhood within the Jewish community for the past several years. And he was showing up precisely on the tenth yahrzeit of my dad, in the very tender place where I was, making himself completely available to my grief and my healing. Asking all the right questions, offering all the right gestures and words. Inviting me to reflect, and process, and share, or not share, whatever I needed to, for this moment, this day, this opportunity, to be met. To be complete.

I will not share the details of this precious encounter here. I will say that the love and presence that were offered to me were deeply, deeply healing. What was likewise as healing was to see that I had done enough work, in all the years leading up to this moment, that I was fully available to receive this offering of love. To accept it: cleanly, neatly, without confusion or messiness or ambiguity of intention, and to be held. Tuesday’s prayer - “Dad, show up!” - was resoundingly answered. Something profound has shifted. The beginning of an allyship is here. If I want to be in touch with him, aligned with him, then my dad IS here for it.

The journey didn’t end there. The next two days welcomed me further into their spontaneous embrace, offering me more community, companionship, and further recapitulation. I spent time shearing sheep with friends, new and old, then shared my songs at a retreat that some friends were hosting nearby. It felt so delightful to be the ‘surprise guest’ at their little gathering - to be there simply to sprinkle some magic and music and then be on my way. To be welcomed and embraced openly, with no reservations or conditions - what a thing!

And the next morning, I took a winding path home, stopping to visit a whole slew of haunted places from my past, places that I hadn’t been in nearly four years - since mere weeks before my mother died. Places that just happened to be on my route home, now, because of the spontaneous decision to go out of my way for the extra night’s retreat. Re-covering this territory in Lakes Basin, making a mikveh in the chilled morning light at Big Bear Lake, methodically cutting energetic ties and releasing old attachments and literally standing on the ground anew, it was simple work, but it was deep. It was, as thing are more and more, about being, not doing. Being present there that day, I was literally laying down new emotional and somatic ley lines for myself. Reclaiming those territories as available and clean for me to remember, and revisit.

No more ghosts in the shadows. Only love.

Dear gentle readers, please know this - if you haven’t discovered it already - I almost never tell a linear story. Yes, at some point, the threads of my four years of enmeshment with and reliance on Adderall - and then later, birth control1 - and the ways that these reliances gave teeth to my limiting beliefs around capacity, which I have since fought mightily to defang - will be picked back up. Will be woven back into a story that might even - but more likely not - start somewhere near the place I left it.

But that is not the story for today. For this portal week of my father’s yahrzeit, heading into Mother’s Day, has opened itself to me - and I to it - in profound and beautiful and sacred ways. In ways far beyond anything I could have conceived of or designed. Which is how I know the hand of the Divine is so present in my life. And so that beauty, that healing, that active, reciprocal magic-making, that ability to receive, is what I must share with you now. The rest can wait.

That Tuesday I had a somatic therapy session. The work was relational and deeply sacred. Because all of our work in this life is relational, on some level or another. And if we’re awake for it, all of our work is sacred too. This whole path of centering the sacred, walking a beauty way2, living in divine reciprocity? It’s the whole damn deal. There’s nothing else worth doing, as far as I can see. It’s why we’re here. Everything else - including art and creativity in all its forms - falls under this umbrella. Or it can, if we let it.

I’ll say it again. All of our wounds are relational, and all of our healing is relational. Thus, all of our work is relational - whether intercellular, interstitial, interpersonal, interstellar, or interminably beyond the beyond. But on this Tuesday, some of the work we were doing had to do specifically with relations with other people. My Dad being one of them. It’s hard to re-enter the space now and talk about it. So think of this post as a cliffs’ notes version of a medicine journey that lasted for days. No matter how much detail I provide (and there will be a LOT), it’s still the barest of thumbnail sketches. So here goes…

We first turned to the subject of my father by offering prayers. Welcoming him and blessing his spirit, and allowing space for the radical possibility that he’s continued to evolve and heal and journey through these last ten years. That he, and his love, could be more accessible to me now. That he could be more healthy, more whole. That I could experience him now as an ally once again, even a resource. A well and benevolent ancestor. That just maybe, without his physical body, he has even been able to shed and transcend some of the more insidious and damaging aspects of his sex addiction, that had so entrapped and entangled him while in his human form.

I don’t take this possibility as a given. I don’t have any habits or structures in place for experiencing him as available. I haven’t experienced him that way for quite some time. I fought against his growing unavailability for years before he died, and it’s hard to remember anything before then, anymore. That fight began in 2009, when he first asked me to support his decision to remarry. And I remember, I flatly refused. I said, “Dad, if you were happy, if this marriage would make you happy, then I could support you. But it won’t, and you’re not.” And his response? His great defense of this awful idea that would ultimately cost him his life? He said, “what’s happy? I’m happy enough.”

Thus began the slow war of attrition that culminated in the form of nearly two years of complete estrangement. My brothers and I had attempted an intervention - and failed. He didn’t hear us. He didn’t see us. In the end, he asked us to leave his house and not come back.

I never saw him again.

So now, this Tuesday, I invited my father - demonstrate this change for me. If you’re different, if you’ve grown, if any of my own healing of our family line has rippled out to affect you too - if you want to be part of my life, then SHOW me. SHOW UP. I’ll watch for your signs.

My homework from that session was a meditation and writing assignment. To sit down and compose a list of the qualities of the noble masculine. What would this healed and restored version of masculinity look like? It was not just to imagine a better version of Dad. It was a task undertaken on behalf of this whole world and all its inhabitants. All of us broken and broken down by thousands of years of patriarchy. And it was a task not just for the ‘men,’ and not about pointing fingers at those who aren’t carrying a womb, but to consider how I can embody and carry these traits within myself, too. Particularly as a queer being, with fluid gender identity and expression and a dynamic and intentional ongoing effort to heal my own relationship to femininity and the Divine Feminine (whole other topic for a whole other time), the brief now was to fold into this my reflection on the heretofore elusive qualities of noble masculinity as well3. To learn to hold them both, intentionally, sacredly. As the next level of my own magical work.

Fast-forward to Thursday morning. May 7^th. Dad’s yahrzeit. I sat down to the assignment in front of my altar. Lit my candle, said a prayer and invocation, offered generous amounts of frankincense and copal, juniper and rose, and I began.

Protector, I wrote. Sacred steward of ritual and innocence.

Blesser, I wrote. Giver of love and support, sacred resource bestower.

Balancer, I wrote. Holder of both/and. Duality and unity. Restorer. Mender. Healer.

Integrity, I wrote. Constancy, reliable, ever-learning. Expanding his alignment with the Divine.

Humble strength, I wrote. Having nothing to prove. He is confident and clean in his actions and words.

Lover and Worshipper, I wrote. Honors and bows before the Feminine. Sees partnership and reciprocity in the divine play of their union.

Patience, I wrote. The elder who holds and sees the longer story and deeper truth, even in the flurry of the day.

Grief-tender, I wrote. Having faced & metabolized his own grief, he holds space for all others to integrate their shadows.

Consort, I wrote. Ever aware of the sacred role of loving well.

I felt buoyed by the process. Cleansed. Clarified. The day was off to a powerful start, and it wasn’t even 7:30am.

Then I went to my superconscious alignment session before my road trip to the hot springs, where I had decided to spend Dad’s yahrzeit day. We were speaking about another idea that had emerged on Tuesday - that my parents’ exits constituted an initiation process for me. Or at least, the start of one. In a world without any sacred initiation rites or wisdom traditions still living in our lineages, my parents, with no traditional or embodied means or skills to induce such an evolution in me, effected the start of one by exiting in the particular ways that they did. At least, I have the choice to see it that way. And because I am centering the sacred, I choose to.

So what was this an initiation into? Self-responsibility and healing, certainly. But more than that, it is an initiation into growing beyond any sense of fixed familial identity. Beyond being the “daughter of” or, to take the gender off the thing, the “child of.” Beyond dwelling in the House of the Fallen. Because here’s the thing. I was working on myself before too, it’s not like I was a total slouch until their suicides. But I can pretty much guarantee - if my parents were still alive, I’d still be entangled with them. Enmeshed with them. Navigating dysfunctional relationships with them, or else, navigating dysfunctional estrangement. I’d be reacting to them, performing for them, and whether I wanted to or not, taking them personally. But that’s all been interrupted. And instead I’ve been reparenting myself (thank you ACA). I’ve been coming into an identity, slowly, painfully, that is so much more than the story of my childhood, or even adulthood. So much more than the shell-shock of “I lost both my parents to suicide and now I have to recover from that.”

There is a sovereignty being nurtured in me. Off the medications now, I can see it starting to bloom. The first few months or so of the taper were tenuous. Frightening. I couldn’t see it then, what I was even aiming for. But now? Now, I’m doing so much better than I even imagined was possible. I’m alive, really ALIVE. Things are HAPPENING. And I’m even walking through the hard things with clean energy. Like this whole week. Like Sunday. Traveling for work, on Mother’s Day. Wearing a necklace that belonged to her, that I’d never worn before. Because it wanted to come along, and I listened (I listen now!). It’s made of twenty-one little stone animals on a beaded string. A whole family of allies and protectors accompanying me. It almost feels like I’m hanging out with Mom, to wear it now.

Back to the initiation question. I’m not calling their suicides a gift. That’s a pretty hard sell. (Though I did, in the wake of dad’s passing, pose that very question. If his death was the only thing Dad could leave me, where’s the gift in it?) But what we discussed on Thursday was, what if it was, when it comes to my own spiritual evolution, not a gift, but a necessity? Precisely the one thing that my parents could do to channel my attention inwards, and upwards. Beyond the old story. Beyond entanglement. To a higher spiral of relation. To my soul’s evolution. What if I needed to be liberated from story and contextual identity in just such a way, that just by this means, and no other, have I arrived in the place I am now? Into a place where I can live in the change. Attempting to access and dwell in the highest states of being. To weave a more elevated story.

In THIS session, we focused on my core wound of not being loved. And the place that I arrived was a deep conviction, thrumming stronger and more confidently than I’ve experienced it before, that truly loving myself feels like experiencing everything that occurs in my life AS LOVE. Easy things? Love. Hard things? Love. Setbacks? Love. Breakthroughs? Love. Drudgery, boredom, the mosquito bite on the middle of my throat that looks ridiculous and itches like crazy? Love. Love. It’s all love. Because that’s the nature of reality. That’s the nature of things. And so my work is to focus on love, and of course, Light. The clear light. BE the light. EXPERIENCE the light. Understand even the darkness as it truly is - disorganized, distorted, addled light. And so I can invite the darkness - welcome it lovingly, even - knowing it for what it truly is. Nothing but obscured light. Light, with adventitious stains.

Darkness, you are welcome to your true nature. Nothing less will do.

This also means that everything that I do, I have the opportunity to do as an act of love, too. Constant acts of loving-kindness and care. For self and for others. Sure, that’s a pretty high bar. But I’m down for it. Besides, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, whether you’re enlightened or not, the job is the same. And I already took the vow4. So let’s do this.

Pause.

I actually think it’s fair to say ‘to be continued’ this time. Because I’m already writing the rest of this story, and it’s long, and it’s important. And I don’t want to rush it. So please, stay tuned. Thank you for your life. And thank you for reading.

For the sake of basic continuity, let me say this.

I stayed on the lithium for the span of a year. I stabilized. I built up my business. I went to therapy. And then I titrated off of it, slowly, carefully, in order to prepare for a series of encounters with a plant medicine that I’d aspired to work with for nearly twenty years.

From the summer of 2018 until the start of the pandemic in 2020, a lot of healing took place. A lot of catharsis, and insight, and integration. I wasn’t shirking my homework, spiritually speaking - in between ceremonies, I was working hard. But be that as it may, I was still ceremony-hopping, in a way. Laser-focused and just a little bit desperate about getting myself from one sacred oasis to the next. Feeling like I needed this medicine. I WAS improving, in many respects. Creatively, emotionally. My art and work were getting better, and more parts of me were coming online. I was processing and healing traumas and feeling more at home in myself too. And it was great to be off the lithium again, to feel free of that reliance.

But I wasn’t entirely pharmaceutical-free. Not by a long shot. In late 2017 I’d pursued a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological testing, subjecting myself to eight hours of a rigorous panel of exams and exercises to assess my cognitive, emotional and behavioral performance. I was hoping to get a bit of helpful insight. A handle on the myriad experiences that my therapist kept pointing out to me as consistent with what we, in this conformity and compliance-oriented civilization, now tend to group under the catch-all phrase, ‘neurodivergence.’

I was frankly expecting an autism or Asperger’s diagnosis. I had done a ton of research at this point, with the help of my therapist, specifically into how Asperger’s shows up in AFAB bodies, and it had consistently blown my mind.3 To put it simply, I related to it all. But I didn’t GET an autism diagnosis.4

Even when I challenged the psychologist’s findings and submitted additional historical accounts from family members to bolster my case (and doesn’t that act in itself, kind of prove the point?), he asserted that I had no real markers for autism beyond my self-reported experience (and what’s that worth, really, at the end of the day?).5 I was, on the other hand, diagnosed with ADHD.

I resented the ADHD diagnosis. I resisted it. Look at how I’d thrived academically, against all odds! Look at my myriad achievements! But ever diligent (obsessive, even. Another marker of my place on some spectrum or other…), I began diving into the research here, too. Trying to understand how I could have gotten just as far through life as I had without a handle on anything like this particular medley of experiences (read: symptoms). Trying to piece together how my intelligence and my coping strategies had worked so well, for so long, until they just suddenly all stopped working, altogether, all at once.

And so I learned. I learned about how from the youngest age, girls are taught to conform, to mask and hide their emotions, thoughts and experiences (things I already knew but hadn’t considered through this particular lens). I learned how this translates into gender discrepancies in the identification and treatment of experiences that could be bundled into the categories of both ADHD and autism.

I also learned how the overlooked or undiagnosed presence of these ways of being creates just the kind of chronic PTSD conditions, emotional explosions and nuclear meltdowns that I had been experiencing, with growing frequency, my whole life and particularly in recent years.6 And how, in fact, this particular blend of presenting ‘symptoms’ often gets misdiagnosed and treated as bipolar instead. What?!7

I learned how many self-employed folx - entrepreneurs, creatives - also carry or qualify for carrying labels like this. That I was actually in very good company. I learned to get beyond the stereotypical image I’d held of what it looked like to “have” ADHD. That it was a cop-out, an excuse. I also learned, from my therapist, to consider that what we now call neurodivergence, in a differently organized society, might well simply be the requisite variety of skill and make-up for a group’s well-being and sustainability. Think about it. Were persistence hunters, for example - who pursued fast-moving prey on foot over long distances, until the animals literally collapsed from heat exhaustion - ‘typical’ in their tribes? How were they trained into those skills? And what if they were selected - or self-selected - into that role because they were outliers, whose particular gifts - hyperfocus, endurance and athleticism - uniquely qualified them to this critical task of sourcing food for their communities? They could run for days, without rest, food, water, sleep. But you can also bet that when they came back to the village with their prey, they got to REST for days. Not a clock in/clock out, industrial or office-based situation. Another rhythm of performance and balance entirely. One that, in those settings, served. One that, today, is explicitly or not, considered divergent. I know one freelancer who calls herself genetically unemployable. Isn’t that just another way of saying we don’t fit into a too-small box? And you could ask the same question about others. Artists. Shamans. Healers. Writers. Many entrepreneurs. Society needed - needs - all these roles filled. But being a square doesn’t qualify you for the job. You’ve got to be tapped into something more. Be more dimensional, more alive. So why is the common parlance to call this - this bounty of capacity and sensitivity, that we should ALL, ideally, be cultivating, at least to some extent - a ‘divergence?’

The tension for me here was to learn, through the lens of these labels, without retroactively creating a new story of pathology about my whole life. A whole new narrative about something being “wrong” with me. Yes, there was the story of ‘I did the best I could until it all became too much and then suddenly the bottom dropped out of all my coping strategies at once.’ But there’s another story, that maybe even hearkens back to when I first went onto meds at age 16 to arrest the destabilization that was occurring - the spiral, paused - and something in me was destabilizing again, as my consciousness and all my parts entered these first stirrings of attempting to wake up and come back online. And what if all of this, from the death of my father, and then my mother, on until now, is part of a much bigger story arc of creatively and spiritually and evolutionarily waking up to my true nature and purpose here? Something about which I was always sure, no matter what successful or creative endeavors I was engaged in, across pretty much all phases of my life, I was still missing the mark.

Another thing that the neuropsychological results called out strongly was my anxiety. Markedly high anxiety. Cripplingly high anxiety. My self-reporting rated it as 10 out of 10. The recommendations for treatment keyed into this in depth, with suggestions for diet, exercise, therapeutic modalities, and of course, medication. Reading back over the findings now, more than eight years later, I’m astounded at how differently I’m calibrated today. Again, topic for another time…

Ultimately, there was a lot more I learned. The labels, in the end, are not what I was after. The labels are a lens through which to view myself, learn things and apply those learnings, and then take what works and leave the rest, until those labels, like any other conceptual patch, all eventually fall off. I’m not in the business of collecting diagnoses (though I did, in my teenage years, collect all the ominous warning labels that came on all the medications I was prescribed. Whose bright idea is it to give a depressed kid a drug that says “avoid direct sunlight?”). No, I’m not here to defend or claim any particular diagnosis as mine or not-mine. None of them get to the root. I’m just making a simple point. That nobody really got what was going on with me, for years. Even when I was actively seeking answers. And so ‘it’ got worse. Until after my dad’s death, daily life finally was unbearable. And I was, even months into taking the lithium, still desperate and curious enough about my own experience - and my lack of any handle on it, even when suicidality was finally again at bay - to seek more insight and knowledge. And so I crept back to those dubious halls of power, to kneel at the throne of those god-like beings who ruled the psycho-pharmacological kingdom of western mental health medicine.

And what I got was this ADHD diagnosis. Which opened up an interesting idea, because - surprise - there was a drug for that.

Enter ADDERALL.

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Patrick Gaffney, a soft-spoken bodhisattva and the heart-son of my root teacher Sogyal Rinpoche, once quoted Winston Churchill at the end of a long summer retreat. I referenced that quote in episode 10 of my comic. It comes to mind again today. Why?

Because this is the last blog post that’s going to use Father. Mother. God. as my jumping off point. I don’t have any more episodes - or videos - standing by.

NOTE: The final episode of Father. Mother. God. (video above) is called Bashert. A Hebrew word for ‘meant to be’, bashert typically refers to a soulmate or a life partner. Destiny. Fate. Well friends, my destiny is to be medication-free. And my soulmate? For starters, that’s got to be me.

If (I should say, WHEN) more artwork is shared here, there’s a very good chance, aside from my soul scribing projects of last year, or making a quick iPhone recording of one of my songs, that I haven’t created it yet. Now of course, I can just keep writing the blog with words. No videos or artwork required. And yet. It feels like the training wheels are coming off. Like my focus is being stretched. Tension heightened. And that’s ironic, because when I tuned into what I should write about this week, I got the opposite topic, in a way. Going back on meds. Responding to crisis mode. Putting the training wheels back ON.

In Inheritance, I wrote about the closest I ever came to taking my own life, at age 19. And then my encounter with the writings of Chogyam Trungpa and the idea of basic goodness, which launched my subsequent journey into a new paradigm. I put the meds down, I put the opium down (I hung onto the weed and alcohol et al for decades more), and I took matters into my own hands. I eventually found the dharma and lasted seventeen years without prescription medications. There is a lot that could be said about those years, but not now.

Instead, I’m going to skip ahead to May 7, 2016, ten years ago next week, when my dad took his life on the eve of Mother’s Day. We had been estranged at this point for almost two years.1 This meant, in a way, that I had pre-grieved some aspects of his loss. I had done loads of therapy. Designed and held sacred ritual space with five other women to midwife me into a new identity, transforming my relationship to myself, and him, and his absence. But all that did nothing to prepare me for his actual passing. I wasn’t sober then, and while the drugs and alcohol were not enough, not nearly enough, I still couldn’t put them down. My marriage was in crisis, I was in a career transition (leaving my desk job and finally trying to build a creative business from scratch. In the midst of complex grief, a foolhardy idea, yet I persevered). And as the months of grief and emotional dysregulation wore on, my own SI (suicidal ideation) grew. And grew, quickly becoming a formidable foe. Before long, the main thing I could hope to accomplish in a day was, if I were lucky, to fight it and win.

My wife and I had moved into a house with an attached garage. I couldn’t even go in there without imagining my dad’s dying moments in his own garage. I had no sense of perspective. “I should just die” was the emotional response to pretty much everything. Every minor irritation, every setback. Even forgetting where I’d put something down, or why I’d walked into a room. “I should just die. You know how I could do it…” I couldn’t rank events according to urgency or importance. Every sensory or emotional input, no matter the size or subject, was a crisis. Executive functioning was entirely offline (this was years prior to my ADHD diagnosis, so honestly, I didn’t even know what executive functioning was. But I sure didn’t have it). And as I watched myself start to slip, I worried that I’d end up following in his footsteps. Not because I actively wanted to die, per se. Just because I was bound to lose the battle, one of these days. It was such a precarious daily grind. And the ways out were so close at hand. The garage was right there…

By the next summer, 2017, I was actively living in fear for my life. Therapy wasn’t enough. Meditation and mind-training wasn’t enough. I didn’t have any other tools, or even know that they existed, let alone where to find them. And so finally, in desperation, I got a referral to a psychiatrist. And after seventeen years without head meds, I started taking lithium, which, as far as psych drugs go, is ‘not that bad.’ By which I mean, it’s technically a naturally occurring substance. A member of the periodic table of elements. It’s in spring water and crazy water and cashews and walnuts and hey, in small doses in its natural form, it’s been relied on for probably thousands of years for its therapeutic effects as a mood stabilizer.

But in pharmaceutical formulations, it’s a bit different. The first thing that happened was my body broke out in hives. A systemic rash response across my legs, arms, and face. I looked like a red, puffy squirrel. I itched like crazy. I was traveling abroad at the time and I just kept taking whatever antihistamines I could find at the local pharmacies, and none of them touched it. Eventually it resolved itself. No harm, no foul, I guess? But the other thing that happened - within literally days of starting the medication - was that the floor was raised. My bottom, suddenly, wasn’t so dangerous. I could reach it, and rest on it, even, and stop the free-falling. The bottom didn’t feel good. But it didn’t reek of death, either. It was a safe place to recombobulate myself. Something had changed.

There are moments, like this one, where the meds work.2

Back now, in the summer of 2016 - it was the day before my 36^th birthday when my brothers and I found out that our dad’s death was definitely a suicide. It had been two months since he died. We’d wondered all along, of course. Sudden death in a garage sounds pretty suspicious for a fit, able-bodied 64 year old man, even if you haven’t spoken to him lately. But the truth had been covered up, you see, by his second wife. She’d lied to the cops, lied to our entire family. She even tried to get the coroner’s report overturned when it was released, and it wasn’t until we got our hands on the full police report ourselves that the facts were finally brought to light.

When the police got to the house that night, there were two cars in the closed garage with our dad’s body. There were keys in both ignitions, and both engines were still warm. There was enough carbon monoxide trapped in the house that the fire department had to run massive fans to air it out before they’d let anyone back inside. It was no accident.

Inside, in the kitchen, was a Mother’s Day card for dad’s wife. And under it, as if to say “I give up. You win. Isn’t this what you wanted?,” was his life insurance policy. A policy he bought when I, his oldest child, was first born. A policy that we were always told was for us three kids. But he’d revised it, naming one primary beneficiary: her.3

When my brothers said to me, that July 4^th morning after talking to our uncle, “Dad killed himself,” my response was three words. “Let’s do drugs.” But even the drugs I did that day did nothing to protect me from the latent SI that I always carried inside. I remember picking my way across some stones in a rushing Colorado river. Slipping on one of them, in the space of the half-second it took to regain my balance, in slid the thought “you’d be better off dead.” I was used to it. It happened all the time. By a year later though, it was constant, insidious, and more than I could bear. And the reason I mention this at all is because, in England that next summer, again with one of my brothers, but now on lithium, for maybe ten days or a week at most, there was a moment when, sleep-deprived, exhausted, crewing for him in a footrace that kept us all up for an insane amount of time, and after days of this systemic rash nonsense making my body an unbearable place to inhabit, I tripped over my own two feet while slowly running along the canals towards the finish line in London. And I didn’t think “you’d be better off dead.” I didn’t think anything at all. I just regained my balance, and kept shuffling along.

That’s the difference, when the meds work. It wasn’t fireworks (well, except for the rash). It was simply the absence of something that could have been lethal. If you didn’t know better, you might not even notice the change. The lithium was working. But that did not mean that I was ever supposed to take it forever.

To be continued…

I’m having to remind myself of this a lot today.

Tachles is a Hebrew word. Yiddish, actually. It means cutting to the chase. Getting to the point. Brass tacks. The bottom line. The core purpose. I’m in the last few days of negotiating which items I will remove from my old house this week. What’s mine, what’s yours, what’s a fair trade. And tachles? It’s not about the items. It’s about my peace of mind. It’s about my liberation. It’s about refraining from harm, orchestrating a clean exit, and no matter what I’m feeling or how much I’m triggered, it’s about making amends to myself by being the adult in the room. Even more, it’s about letting the Divine be the adult in the room. Tachles? It’s not about the objects. And I don’t have to do this alone.

“God is in drag as each of us,” the eleventh episode says. “How often do I still fall for the disguise?”

My former partner? She’s God in disguise. Introducing me to the nature of reality, again and again. And so am I. But my disguise is changing. It’s been almost five months now that I’ve been living psych-medication free. Nearly seven months since the taper began. Seven months of taking away the chemical straitjacket that was cutting me off from the Divine. So here I am. In touch (again? at last?) with the fundamental human experience. It’s magic. And it hurts.

There isn’t a way around this hurt, only through it. And it’s up to me to contextualize it in ways that are sacred, and not pathological. To not pathologize another. To not pathologize myself.

“First we’re born, then the healing begins,” the comic says. I love that phrase. Even though the person who first said it to me is also no longer in my life. No longer an active teacher of mine. No longer an active friend.

There are so many goodbyes. Once the losses begin, they don’t stop. They pile up for the rest of our lives, until we are all grieving, all bereft. There’s nothing unique about this. But once the healing begins, it too, can pile up and multiply for the rest of our lives. With grief comes praise. And that’s what I’m focusing on now. What does it take to heal, my entire comic asked. And how far am I willing to go?

I’m willing to go all the way. Into the darkness, into the pain, into the breach. Into recognizing and taking responsibility for all my defense mechanisms and coping strategies. The features of my personality that traditional twelve step program often call ‘defects’ (the more trauma-informed programs soften this to ‘defaults’) of character. I’m willing to inventory them, own them, and then to do the often exhausting work of discarding and upgrading them. Why? Because I’m also willing to go all the way into the light. The blinding, dazzling, naked, clear, all-encompassing light.

I feel so exposed right now. Feeling everything. How many times as a child did my mother admonish me. You’re too sensitive, she’d say. As if my sensitivity were a liability or a flaw. In early recovery I literally wrote these words in my journal - I don’t have time for all these feelings. God, they’re inconvenient. But I’m facing them all now. I’m not running away. I’m not numbing them out. I’m not suppressing them, but neither am I indulging them. I’m bearing witness, and I’m giving them space.

This morning in my Psalms class, chanting and studying with Shefa Gold, we focused on what she calls ‘the path of comfort’ (one of eight pathways through the Psalms). It’s about moving into a place of receptivity to Divine grace and embrace.

On Sunday morning I was in a workshop with my mentor, Ellen Coomber1, doing intuition readings with my fellow classmates. When we observe the obvious using intuition - which is, at its most basic, simply whatever occurs to us before the rational mind enters in and attempts to discount it and sweep it away - we can uncover a profound amount of reliable information from the simplest of sources. A symbol, a circle. In this case, a single sentence. The prompt was to finish the phrase, “the next step for me to express my spirit in the world is…”

I wrote, The next step for me to express my spirit in the world is to relax. Relax into the all-encompassing embrace of the Divine.

I first did a variation of this particular exercise more than six years ago, and I’ve done it many times since. In other words, I knew what I was in for. I know how it goes. So I also know that there is no way to intuition-proof your answer. No matter what I wrote, my fellows would be able to read right through it, keying into all my limiting beliefs and concepts at play. Nonetheless, I thought, this time I did pretty good! What could be so wrong with relaxing into the all-encompassing embrace of the Divine?

A lot, it turns out. And it hinged on that one word, relax. First they pointed out how I think I have to relax, in order to be embraced by the Divine in the first place. That I make my relaxing a pre-condition. As if I’m not ALREADY in the embrace of the Divine, right here and right now. The fact that this embrace might not feel like I wanted it to, not how I expected it? That becomes my ego’s reason to reject it, to tense up, to put up a fight. To double down on the false idea that I have to somehow hold it all together until I can finally at some other point, not now, relax. I had heard someone2 say just the afternoon before in a song circle, “it’s not about us having to ‘hold it all together’ (as an individual). It’s about holding it all together” (as in, collectively. ALL of us holding ALL of us). Despite knowing this full well in theory, my simple little sentence the next morning still belied the fact that my ego was tenaciously clinging to a story of going it alone, me against the Divine. Ha, I mean, me against the world.

Then someone pointed out - which was even more amazing for them not knowing the Torah story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, not knowing how deeply I resonate with that story or how I consider myself a God-wrestler par excellence, by both vocation and birthright - that wrestling is also a valid form of embrace, and there’s no relaxation in it! That when I’m wrestling with God, beating my chest in anger, fighting back, that even THEN, I’m IN the all-encompassing embrace of the Divine. So my ego, my small self, my conditioning, says I can only be embraced when I’m calm, when in fact, the opposite is true. It’s IN the embrace of the Divine that I can relax, become calm, let myself BE calmed. But my limiting beliefs tell me it’s the other way around. Requiring a set of circumstances, most definitely beyond my control, to be a certain way before I can have what I want.3

My fellows said to me, you can be angry and be safe. Your CAGE (the Conditions, Assumptions, Guilt and Expectations that we construct our realities around. Thanks to Ellen Coomber for this acronym) tells you how you can express yourself, how you must express yourself, in order to receive love. So you filter pieces of yourself out, instead of letting all the parts of yourself be embraced and expressed right where you are. Yup. Guilty as charged. I sure do that.

They went on. You hold the Divine to very high standards, they continued. But your experience will always be filtered through the world, too. So searching for the ‘perfect’ Divine experience or perfect person as a conduit of the Divine? It’ll never happen. The Divine can come to you through anyone - including someone who is very broken. Oh, right. ‘God is in drag as each of us. How often do I fall for the disguise?…’

My CAGE tells me I have to do it alone. Especially without the meds, kid, it’s just just me against/with (is there even a difference?) the Divine. No other support. No other trustworthy options. And by giving myself the precondition of needing to relax first, I place the Divine far away. But the Divine is coming to me! FOR me! It is, and it always will be, coming to find me, to meet me. Is ALREADY meeting me, right here. My CAGE thinks I have to strive for it. To work very hard at being relaxed. To try harder, not softer. They pointed out how busy my ego is working to make peace conditional for me. Setting unrealistic, punishing standards as a prerequisite for peace. Oh yes, and at the last minute, raising the bar on myself. Not even the Divine is holding me to standards like this. No wonder it’s hard to relax. And thus, no wonder it’s hard to receive and experience the embrace of the Divine. One person put it this way. In spirit, these impossibly high standards are aspirations, or even, requests. No problem. Good to have. Creative tension. But in my CAGE, they’re treated like KPIs (key performance indicators, to those of you blessed enough not to know that term). And they’re cruelly enforced. And I’m always falling short.

Bottom line? The all-encompassing expanse cannot be approached through restriction. So in other words, fuck relaxing, just relax.

All this, from a single sentence that I said out loud once. THAT’s how intuition works.

So this morning, in Psalms class, there we were, focusing on the path of comfort. And one by one, the chants that we worked with reminded me of everything I re-learned about myself yesterday, giving me tools to enact and renew my commitment to meet the Divine, right here where I am, right now, in all the discomfort.

First we chanted about being held in the Great Mother’s embrace. Not being calm and then being embraced as a reward. Nothing conditional about it, being calmed by the embrace. Then we chanted about flying off to encounter the secret presence of God, the shekhinah, which is a central and divinely feminine principle of Judaism. Often the shekhinah is described as winged - wrapping us and sheltering us in its wings. But in this chant, we were the ones with the wings, flying to meet its embrace. When my mother died, I spent weeks sewing an elaborate pair of wings as an act of mourning.

They had become a sacred object to me already, but it was only today that I connected them to this particular manifestation of Divine love, the shekhinah. In the next chant, from Psalm 94, we leaned into the contrast between the wrestling and the relaxing - both forms of embrace in their own right. We heightened the tensions of our discomfort, singing in Hebrew, “when worries multiply within me, Your comfort soothes my soul.” I danced around my room. Shadow-boxing and wrestling with the air, accentuating the angst of the worries multiplying within. And then swinging my arms wide and letting grace flow into me, as the comfort soothed my soul.

Heightening the tension, heightening the contrast, puts my eyes back on the prize. An experienced creator loves tension. Because we know that tension seeks resolution - along the path of least resistance. My only job is to hold the tension. To even consider the tension a Divine embrace. Tachles? The Divine embrace is already happening. Right. Now.

Yesterday I took part in another form of return. Returning to my true self and true home. I still struggle for words to describe this new modality I have found. It’s intuitive and spirit-led, much like the work I already do, and each decision and pattern we run is directly backed up by muscle testing for accuracy. You could call it superconscious alignment, but it extends even beyond the superconscious to include all my guides, holy helpers, and Source itself. I’m learning it as fast as I can so that I can fold it into the coaching work that I do. The impact is immense and immediate. It feels like being upgraded, at a systems-level, each time we meet. It’s like a psychic power washing, from the inside out.

Yesterday, a lot of the work we did was directly at the level of my programming. My self-conscious mind would say ‘yes, of course I’m willing to make this change, it’s so reasonable,’ while my programming would say ‘nope, not going there yet, it isn’t safe.’ And so we’d unpack and play around in there until we could free it up and get my full system alignment and buy-in to proceed.

I’m going to attempt to describe what this session was like. Because on a brass tacks level, and also on the level of metaphysical metaphor, we were talking about moving. Something I’m still in the middle of doing1.

Specifically, both symbolically and also quite practically, we focused on my leaving what we called the House of the Fallen, and moving into what I am calling the House of Light.

The House of the Fallen? That’s where I’ve been living pretty much my whole life, probably even longer. Honestly, most of us have. I was born right into it, inheriting my place there from multiple generations before me.2 Without any judgment or condemnation, this is how it was described to me. People are needy there, people are broken (aren’t we all?). But if they stay there, then consciously or not, they are looking for someone to serve them. To rescue them. Someone they can rely on, collude with, and enroll in their stories. Or worse, someone to control. Someone to keep them nestled in their own dysfunction. Someone they can count on to keep them unaccountable, so they don’t ever have to do their own work themselves.

What kept me committed to staying there so long? On the one hand, there’s apparent compassion and loyalty. But when I dig deeper, I find it’s really idiot compassion3 and misplaced loyalty.4 The longing to free others from suffering, when enacted mistakenly through acts of enabling, is what’s known as idiot compassion (a term coined by Chogyam Trunpa). And it gets held right alongside the mistaken idea that leaving that place or those people and patterns myself, despite the deleterious effect they’re having on me, would be abandoning them, a betrayal that I can’t make. It’s the misplaced loyalty to dysfunctional family systems that programs like ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families) work so hard to help us disrupt. I survived my dad taking his life rather than leave a house, a marriage and a situation that he couldn’t face walking away from. And I keep learning that my own work is to chart a different path. I can’t actually uplift people who don’t want to do their part. I don’t have to be loyal to patterns that do not serve. And despite all the tools at my disposal, I can’t help anyone who isn’t ready. Even the Buddhas and all the masters cannot take away or ripen a person’s karma without that person also doing their part.

I also had questions of readiness and worthiness. Who am I to leave? Am I really, finally, ready to? What held me there, in essence, were my own limiting beliefs, and a deep-seated fear of the unknown. The thing is, I know how to live in the House of the Fallen. I know how to navigate drama and volatility. I know how to bend myself around the demands of depression and avoidance, whether mine or another’s. I’m so good at appeasement. It’s not comfortable to me, but it’s familiar. Further into the session, the main doubt that surfaced in investigating my hesitancy was this - but are my skills from here actually portable? Can I take them anywhere else? In other words, am I actually viable in the House of Light?

The first moments of considering my departure from the House of the Fallen were accompanied by a strong physical sensation - a full bodily shuddering of deep terror and fear. The statements that emerged to align me around this shift were two: I owe it to myself to leave the House of the Fallen, and I survived the House of the Fallen. I knew these to be true in theory, but still I couldn’t move. Unpacking this further, building rapport with all my parts, underneath these there was a third necessary statement - I understand what it feels like to leave the House of the Fallen. But I could only partially sign onto this one too. And so we dug deeper, working on the fear. The statement that emerged then was, I shrink my fear and embrace my fierceness. An action that I could own, could imagine, and could take. A door opened. Movement began. Calibration of these statements often involves repetition of the words, synchronized with specific patterns of breathing, eye-gazing, visualization and other movements. I can almost see the little rainbow wheel spinning on the desktop of my mind. Stand by, system updating…

Harmonizing my system, I receive all that is truly mine. Stable, healthy love. Safety. Creative expression and authentic embodiment on multiple channels. Knowing that my perspective is desired, and is itself a gift, I am free to curate my own environment. This environment to create, I was asked, what is it? I answered spontaneously from the deep wellspring of my vajrayana Buddhist trainings. There’s an outer, inner, and secret environment, I said. All these levels are required.

And so we worked on another statement. I, and all the parts of me that say ‘I’ here and now, am ready to receive all that is mine.

Then we looked at where I’m living now, this interim home, which is a welcome refuge and yet still not a place my being feels completely safe (though this was news to me!). Mostly because it’s not a place to stay - it’s a place to move through. What is unsafe about this, then, besides its impermanence? Again, this perception has roots in my limiting beliefs. My egoic self, seeking orientation from outside, chains itself to identity and to facts of the matter, rather than the truth of the spirit. Incidentally, this is where most of us spend most of our time - resolving our identity, managing our circumstances. Mistaking this apparently ‘responsible engagement’ with current and past realities for the pursuit of what we truly want. It’s not creative, it’s reactive. The impulse to do this never goes away. But we can shrink the time we spend there, and reorient towards the Light, and true choice, again and again.

Here’s where the question of transferable skills really arose. So what, I was asked, are these skills of mine that I’m concerned won’t be useful in the House of Light? What is keeping me from seeing myself as an equal to the people and archetypes that I imagine are already dwelling there? After all, there is no hierarchy in the House of Light. Hierarchy is a human construct.

Patience, I said. Understanding. Flexibility. Not taking things personally. Radical self-reliance. Discipline. Fortitude. Radical self-awareness. A sense of humor.

It’s funny to look at the list now. How could these skills not be transferable? They’re exactly what anyone in the House of Light might need… And so we began orienting myself around moving into this House. Asking who else lives there (not humans, exactly, but ascended masters, guides, teachers, benevolent and well ancestors, and so on) and could I possibly see myself living freely alongside them. Now I could.

I was asked about the best version of myself. Who would I like to be? My answers were free, daring, generous, playful and loving. Again, very transferable qualities, I was beginning to see.

We did another process to integrate this, to upgrade my response and my alignment around these qualities and how I perceive them coming forward with me.

Then came another I owe it to myself statement. This time, focusing on freeing up my attention and energy from the entanglements with the House of the Fallen, knowing that my turning away from that house, and its occupants, is not an abandonment of them, but a ceasing of the abandonment of myself. I owe it to myself to turn away and still be available. We dug deeper, until I could own the statement, I understand what it means to turn away and still be available.

This is, again, not about an abandonment or a betrayal. It’s about where I place my focus. I can turn back and extend a hand at any time. I can be exquisitely responsive. But I can also put my attention and care and effort directly towards the Light.

The effect of integrating these statements is that they are now woven into my outer, inner, and secret memory. These new higher agreements uplevel and overwrite my old patterns and stories about needing to remain in the House of the Fallen. Once we got to this place, where I had alignment about understanding what it means, and owing it to myself, to turn away from the House of the Fallen, everything rolled up. One by one, I found alignment with all of the previous statements, revisiting and actualizing each one until we’d closed every open loop, and we were back where we’d begun.

I understand what it means to turn away, and still be available.

I owe it to myself to turn away, and still be available.

I and all the parts of me that say ‘I’ here and now am ready to receive all that is mine.

I shrink my fear and embrace my fierceness.

I understand what it feels like to leave the House of the Fallen.

I survived the House of the Fallen.

I owe it to myself to leave the House of the Fallen.

And so it is. This IS t’shuvah, which can also be translated as Atonement. Repair. Restoration. At-ONE-ment. Rather than carrying any connotations of guilt, it hearkens a return to a primordial state of purity that already exists. I am returning to the House of Light.

Last week I caught a new song, concretizing the work from one of my recent somatic therapy sessions. I am choosing to celebrate myself, my heart, my well-being, my desires. I choose to no longer abandon or reject myself. Here it is.