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A presence before personality.

Not a destination we reach by striving, but rather dissolving.

The more we dissolve the fixed identity the more our essence is REVEALED.

Making sound and shapes in and through our bodies lead is a path forward to new ideas and the birth place of creativity.

ENJOY!

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This week we had an eclipse. I wasn’t knowing this cognitively. I sat in meditation and felt called to my heart. I felt called to toggle between the stability of my spine and the support of whatever was holding me, and then dip down into my heart. Then I opened Instagram and saw we were entering the Leo eclipse. I am a Leo. I felt this eclipse in my whole body before I had a name for it. It’s waking me up at 3am. It’s calling me further into the depths of my heart.

Let me back up a bit and talk about cyclical living, and my relationship to nature and creativity.

For as long as I can remember, the middle of August has been marked in my soul as a time of deep grief. Historically, it marked a time where I’d experience the worst anxiety and panic attacks. I would brace for impact starting August 1st. The underlying emotion I couldn’t bear to feel was GRIEF. My mind would race and loop and spiral into an oblivion. My nervous system was shot full of cortisol and adrenaline that stayed up. I wouldn’t sleep, and my only way to any peace was through drugs. Thank God for Ativan.

The problem was, my doctor wouldn’t prescribe me very much. They wanted me to get therapy, and I did. The problem with talk therapy was it kept me in the mind, in a story. What I needed were tools to enter into the body and learn HOW TO FEEL AGAIN.

I was petrified to feel. The level of grief my heart contained seemed insurmountable. I spent so much of my life self-medicating to NOT FEEL. I couldn’t have expressed this in words at the time, but in hindsight I can tell it clearly — I wanted to be numb. My body was sending signals I didn’t have the capacity to decode. Art and nature became my guides.

I began to notice something happening with my art practice. It was cyclical. I’d be very active and productive in spring and summer. The beginning of fall would call me inward. I’d want to stop producing as much and feel called to go inside of myself, and the anxiety would deepen that call , like the contraction had to get loud before I’d finally listen to it.

I’m telling you all of this because it’s the ground the rest of this stands on. All week I’ve been guided, pulled, back into the heart space. If you’re not used to dropping your awareness there, it can feel like walking into a room you’ve been avoiding for reasons you don’t fully remember. For me, that room has always held grief. It still does. But this year is different, and I want to share with you why.

This week I dropped our youngest off at his first day of high school. He’s fourteen. Yesterday, we took our middle son to his freshman year of college. Moving him into a dorm, driving home without him. Our oldest son is taking his real estate exam today so that he can acquire his first “real job” and fly the nest for good. And…underneath all of these thresholds, quietly, the way it does every year this time, is the fact that my daughter’s birthday is coming. She died. This is the exact season that used to send me into oblivion by August 1st, bracing, medicating, trying to outrun it. Three sons stepping into new lives in the same 48 hours, and the ghost of a birthday I’ll never get to plan, all arriving at once, in the eclipse’s week, no less. My heart didn’t choose this timing. It just has to hold it.

When the waves come you face them. That’s a line from a song by The Kills, and it’s been looping in my head like a metronome, keeping time for something I didn’t used to have a way to do. I used to brace for the wave. Numb for the wave. Now I hear that line and understand it’s not a suggestion, it’s an instruction I’m finally equipped to follow. Today the grief wave came …not metaphorically, I mean I felt it move through my chest like weather and instead of reaching for anything to make it stop, I let it. Gathering the courage to witness my own breaking heart, instead of managing it from a safe distance, is the actual practice all those years of panic attacks were trying to teach me.

I woke up at 3am this week, then again at 5am. Lying there in the dark, agitated in that old familiar way, I remembered something a therapist told me years ago: your sensitivity feels like a curse now, but one day it’ll be your greatest gift. For a long time that was just a sentence I carried around. This week, for the first time, I think I felt what she meant. The same nervous system that used to flood me with cortisol at 3am is the one that felt an eclipse in my body before Instagram told me it was happening. It’s the same signal. It was never a design flaw. It just took me twenty years to build the capacity to read it instead of run from it.

This is the work I do in my own heart now, most days, quietly, with no one watching: resolving. Restoring. Mending. Breaking. Expanding. Contracting. I used to think all of that meant something was wrong with me …that a well person wouldn’t cycle like this. Now I think it’s just tuning, the same way my art practice has always moved through spring and summer expansion, then fall and winter contraction, whether I fought it or not. You don’t tune an instrument once. You tune it every time the season changes, every time an eclipse moves through, every time the wood shifts with the weather. My whole life has been doing that, whether I understood it as tuning or as falling apart. Now I know which one it is.

So if our bodies are instruments , and I believe they are … the real question isn’t how do I stop feeling this much? It’s what does it take to stay in tune with what I feel, on the schedule it actually keeps. Not just once…Cyclically, for the rest of my life.

Tuesday night I taught a class I’ve been calling, “The Third Thing.” I’ve been pointing myself, and the people who move with me, toward something beyond just self and effort. Some higher current, the great mystery, the muse, whatever you want to call the thing that runs the show when we finally get out of our own way. Someone asked me, straight out, “What is the third thing?” And before I could filter it, I said, “God.” Then I caught myself, because I know what that word does to people, what it did to me for a long time. So I said, “ I hesitate to say that, because it’s triggering, but when I say God I mean the thought that comes from nowhere. The one I wouldn’t have thought of myself. The orchestration underneath the orchestration.”

I’ve been noticing that orchestration in the smallest places. A few weeks ago I found a worm stranded on concrete and moved it into the mud, certain I was saving its life. My friend, hearing the story, asked one question that’s stuck with me since: “what if it were going the way it wanted?” I hadn’t considered that its path across the concrete might have had its own intelligence behind it , that I hadn’t rescued anything, I’d just overruled something, the same way I spent years overruling my own signals because I didn’t trust what they were telling me.

Today I saw a caterpillar at the threshold of my door. (Wink wink , the threshold, of course.) And instead of doing what I did with the worm, I sat down and waited. I watched it move at its own unbearable pace toward the exact place where the door might smoosh it, and instead of intervening I just stayed present. Once it cleared the danger zone on its own timing, I got up and left … trusting that whatever intelligence was navigating that small body knew more about where it needed to go than I did.

That gap, between moving the worm and sitting with the caterpillar, is the whole arc, if I’m honest. It’s the same instinct catching itself the second time. It’s the same shift that took me from bracing for August 1st with a prescription in hand, to sitting on the floor of my heart at 3am, actually listening. Not managing. Not fixing. Not deciding I know where the grief, or the worm, or the eclipse, is supposed to go. Just staying present enough to trust the intelligence that’s already there.

I didn’t move the caterpillar. I’m learning, one wave, one August, one eclipse at a time, not to move the grief either. Not to rush it toward comfort, not medicate it into silence, not decide it’s arriving on the wrong schedule. Just to sit at the threshold of it, the way I sat at the threshold of my own door, and let it clear in its own time.

Three sons stepping into new lives this week. A birthday coming that will never be celebrated the way it should. A nervous system that used to spiral every August and is now, for the first time, listening instead of running. A heart that keeps resolving, breaking, expanding, contracting, on a schedule I don’t control and no longer need to.

Are you in tune?

Maybe it’s not a sound you make once and keep. Maybe it’s a cycle you return to, season after season, eclipse after eclipse, wave after wave ,the note the instrument already knows, if you stop trying to play it yourself.

Hopelessness, Fear, Anger, and False Pride

Enteringinto:

Sacred pride, Courage and Trust

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The first card I pulled was this one. Mother/Nurturing. The shadow aspect of this card is MARTYR. Ewww! Such a dirty word to me. Martyr wears a badge of suffering with pride. (Talk about what I’d like to leave behind.) I always stop to look at the card to take in with my senses the imagery and what the picture does to my body. To me I really felt the nurture in this card. Nurture as life giving. It let me know I meed to nourish myself and let go, be held and trust. Trust that if I do honor my need for nourish and nurture all will be well. I made a note to cancel a dinner plan that I knew I didn’t have the energy for.It was time to surrender to the fact that I am depleted. My body was telling me and the card was telling me.

I then looked to the book for its meaning and it named something that landed on me like lightning. Jolting me like truth often does. It said the onset of western civilization was built on conquest. Conquest over COHERENCE. This is the point at which Mother Goddess went underground. My lens widened from person to collective. This Martyr pattern ( over give, self-sacrifice, prove worth through depletion) isn’t just my habit, its an inherited one.

I understood something in that moment. Abundant life source isn’t something we have to pursue, it’s ever present and flowing naturally, READY THE MOMENT WE SOFTEN. It vibrates through my veins, my belly, breasts and aparantly…my throat. Feeling run down after days of “should-ing”is my body initiating coherence. When my mind wouldn’t allow it, the body stepped in.

As this relates to the Lion’s Portal activation, I pulled a second card:

Gotta be honest. The picture did nothing for me. I saw what I thought to be a night sky at the top, the bird under worlds? I didn’t know, so, I went to the book. The card says to get your “ducks in a row” ( was that a duck?lol.) That big change is coming and we need to prepare. A practical card. This led me to inquiry… what can I let go of? What do I need to prioritize in preparation for change?

THE BODY KNOWS BEFORE THE MIND DOES

The body registers and knows before language or story forms. Cognition is always catching up with the body. So, if your’e seeing all this hype around letting go and calling in around the Lion’s Portal and you think, “ I don’t know what I’m releasing or calling in” that’s honest and not a problem to solve with more thinking.

This next option will require a willful suspension of disbelief…choose to engage with a Power that doesn’t ask to be understood at first. Conquest power demands to know the plan before it moves. I am talking about a different power, one that moves first and lets understanding arrive after, if it arrives at all. If you dont know, don’t FORCE an answer, ask the body instead, allow it to answer in movement instead. Trust me, it’s the easier softer way.

PRACTICE: How to Dance the Portal

PLAYLIST

1. Stand or sit at an imagined threshold - the Portal itself. No planning what comes next.

2. Ask silently, “what wants to leave?” Don’t go to the mind. Go to the body, and allow it to respond in movement. Anything goes here, folks! Shaking, rolling, hooting, holloring, expanding, contracting, collapsing, falling… let it be small, large, ugly, graceful. No story necessary.

3. Pause. one hand on heart, one hand on your belly. FEEL.

4. Ask, “what wants to enter?” Again, no words. Just practice.

5. Let rythym and gesture emerge from these two questions. Let the meaning arrive when it’s ready…if it is ever ready. Live and dance the questions! Let go of the need for a story, lean into trust.

   Dance the Portal

I will leave you with this playlist for practice. Trust your body as you awaken to sensations as information. Practice listening to the body and not the mind. It is an initiation. Your’e building a relationship. Go slow. Play. Enter with loving kindness, curiosity, devotion to your heart and The Great Mystery of Mother Goddess. Allow her to reveal herself to you. It doesn’t have to be WHOLE HEARTED…you can go 1%, simply by turning toward it as a concept to play with.

(I made the collective an altar today, holding all of us in the light.)

Blessed dancing.

L E S L I E

It’s fun to play with the possibility that there is a mystical portal calling us forward to help us let go of what’s been holding us back from our highest potential. I am a big believer in feeling is believing. Manifesting by way of feeling in the body first to assist the mind. We EMOTE to let go and build capacity for something else.

So, without further ado, let us begin.

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WHERE IT STARTED

My father, Tommy Dean, was a Vietnam Vet. Before he left for war he had to identify his mother’s body. She had been beaten so badly by his alcoholic father that she ended up on the train tracks and didn’t survive. Trauma, on trauma on trauma. Living in the cellular memory of my ancestors and passed into me.

My dad survived the war. His whole platoon didn’t. “Any dayI’m alive is a gift and I’ll live it as I choose.”, he told me more than once.He was magnetic, tenderhearted, funny, painfully honest, a drug dealer, a daily alcohol drinker, an absent father who abandoned 3 children…He carried a gun. He prayed, He broke my heart over and over, and I always knew how much he loved me. He just couldn’t be who I needed him to be.

THE INITIATION

The night my mother packed us up in the middle of the night to escape an abusive stepfather, we were dropped of at our father’s apartment. He was mid-party. Weed, lines of white powder on ceramic plates, women galore, and The Rolling Stones on the turn table. My brother and I were happy with his distraction as we watched the rated R movie, “FLASHDANCE”. My dad said we could make ourselves a “drink” and I took advantage of pouring the biggest PINKEST glass of white zin ( just like the other ladies) and drank it with a big smile and something that felt like PRIDE.

I couldn’t name it then, but the feeling I felt that night was edgy, dangerous and free. I rarely saw my dad and I wanted deeply to know and be known by him. What I understood underneath language was he wasn’t going to drop into my world or my experience, I would have to drop into his.

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I really care and would love to know!

Tell me.

xo