What follows is a written transmission inspired by our recent Moon Circle. Rather than a word-for-word transcript, it gathers the central themes, images, and invitations from our time together into a form that can be read slowly and returned to often.

Paid subscribers receive access to the complete Moon Circle recording, where the full teaching, seasonal context, embodied practices, and unfolding conversation can be experienced in their original rhythm. Whether you choose to read, listen, or move between both, may this offering meet you exactly where you are.

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We gathered beneath a Full Moon that felt less like illumination and more like amplification.

The circle began with Nepal.

With mountains and rivers. With memory. With gratitude for a land and people who have offered so much spiritual knowledge, artistry, generosity and care, now facing the devastating consequences of flooding and a climate crisis whose burdens are profoundly unequal.

And perhaps that was already the teaching of this moon.

Because this Full Moon Lunar Eclipse arrives in Shatabhisha, the mysterious Aquarian nakshatra sometimes translated as the Hundred Healers, but perhaps more evocatively understood as one hundred healed.

That small shift in language opened the door for our inquiry.

What happens when healing multiplies?

What happens when one healed person becomes a different kind of parent, practitioner, teacher, neighbor, leader or ancestor?

What happens when healing stops being understood as an individual achievement and becomes a resource poured outward into the collective?

Aquarius carries the image of the vessel whose waters are poured out for the many. And beneath this eclipse, that image became something larger: healing as a multiplying force. Healing as infrastructure. Healing as something capable of moving through bodies, relationships, communities and systems.

But this is not a particularly gentle moon.

Rahu is involved, and Rahu amplifies. Desire grows louder. Possibility can become intoxicating. Something can arrive and feel so perfectly destined that we immediately begin writing the story of why it must be ours.

So this moon also asks for discernment.

Not every revelation requires immediate action.

Not every desire is destiny.

Not every doorway needs to be walked through while the eclipse is still rearranging the light.

There is tremendous spiritual and intuitive potency here, but there is also obscuration. This is a beautiful time for meditation, dreamwork, pattern recognition, research and listening beneath the surface. It may be less useful for forcing answers, signing the life-changing contract, having the enormous relationship conversation or insisting that clarity arrive on command.

And then the conversation widened.

Because if Shatabhisha carries medicine for the many, we have to ask why so many need healing in the first place.

We live inside systems capable of producing extraordinary abundance while distributing suffering with astonishing efficiency. And redistribution alone cannot heal what systems of domination continually reproduce.

We have to travel farther upstream.

Into the structures.

Into the stories.

Into the ways domination has been internalized within us.

Into the places where decolonization becomes not simply political analysis, but spiritual practice.

This became one of the deepest invitations of the circle: perhaps awakening in this era looks less like escaping the material world and more like becoming profoundly accountable to it.

There is no thousand-petaled enlightenment somewhere above the conditions of the Earth.

The spiritual work is here.

In how resources move.

In how power moves.

In whose suffering we notice.

In what we choose to repair.

In the systems we participate in and the systems we are willing to imagine differently.

In how we become people capable of pouring something nourishing back into the world.

As I said during the circle, we will have to do the spiritual thing in the material.

And perhaps this is why the image of one hundred healed feels so potent.

We are living through many kinds of flooding: physical, emotional, energetic, intellectual and spiritual. There is too much information, too much grief, too much urgency, too much waiting to be metabolized.

We may need new kinds of multipliers.

Practices that ripple.

Teachers who teach teachers.

Healers who help create healers.

Communities that restore the capacity of other communities.

Ideas whose usefulness expands as they are shared.

Not one person carrying the impossible task of healing the world, but healing becoming fractal.

One becomes ten.

Ten become one hundred.

One hundred touch thousands.

Not because we have perfected ourselves, but because what has been restored within us changes what becomes possible around us.

So beneath this strange, potent, supercharged moon, the invitation is not necessarily to do more.

Listen.

Notice what is being amplified.

Notice what is being obscured.

Notice what desires are shouting and which quieter knowing remains after the noise settles.

Ask what wants to become rooted deeply enough that you are willing to stay with it after the portal closes and the celestial drama moves on.

And perhaps ask:

If something in me were truly healed, what might become possible beyond me?

Because the prayer with which we closed the circle was not simply for your healing.

It was for your healing, and then your ripple.

An Invitation

Where is the ripple beginning for you?

The Full Moon gives us a collective story, but it lands differently in each of our lives. Your birth chart can help locate where these larger movements are touching your particular season: what is being illuminated, what is ready to shift, and what may be asking for deeper attention.

I approach astrology as orientation, not prediction. A reading is a space to listen to the timing of your life without giving your power away, and to consider how you want to meet what is unfolding.

If this moon has stirred something you want to understand more deeply, I invite you to book an astrology reading with me. Perhaps the question is not only What is happening? but what is this moment asking of me?

Astrology with Yoli

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This Full Moon Eclipse in Shatabhisha feels like the latter. A little volatile, deeply intuitive, spiritually potent, and asking us to pay attention to what gets louder when the usual light is obscured.

At the center of this circle is an idea I keep returning to: one hundred healed. N…

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We are in our third month of integration-time here in Chicago having recentered ourselves in the lands of the Sacred Great Lakes June 1st. The short of it– all are well and Rhodes is so very happy to be back to the place he calls home. My mom is well and very happy to be back together after several rental and roommate adventures.

It’s a bit wild out in these American streets! Taking time to be outside of a place and then returning provides one fresh perspective on trends, moods and overall collective senses of being. Not gonna lie, it’s intense here. The feeling externally: good ‘ole midwestern politeness, tight smile and a greeting hello. The feeling internally: white-knuckle grip because we are so deep into the unknowns, the instability.

Reflecting with a friend yesterday I shared my insight that we are literally threshold generations living through threshold times. The ground isn’t supposed to feel firm. We are moving in an era of high changeability and it will be this way for our lifetimes. We are old enough that we were fed the post-WWII model that stability is within everyone’s grasp if you work hard and play by the rules. 1980’s onwards the rules began to change drastically.

The 2026 result feels wreckless– change for selfish reasons not the benefit of the collective nor towards the solutions of our economic inequities. Where is this ongoing tension showing up in your body? How could your contemplative and embodiment practice be supporting you right now?

The other massive problem we’ve inherited is an era of individualization fed by the nuclear family and technological innovation (amongst other factors). The goal of the macro social and cultural initiatives is to separate us from one another as much as possible in order for us to continue to be compliant to the system’s design.

Today’s message is to call us back to ‘healing in community’. Simple put: we are not meant to heal alone. Or imagine. Or play. Or dream. Beauty Way Healing Arts continues to evolve as an ecosystem for our relational ecology of healing. Our programs for learning are to revive the intuitive capacities we are gifted with and develop them in order to express our special purposes for being and to be of service in the ‘changing of the worlds’. You matter. Your purpose matters. Our collective harmonies in singing our heartsongs matter.

I’ve put some time towards visioning Fall 2026 and 2027 offerings with great intention. The key word is DEEPENING. We don’t need more, we need to go deep with what we have introduced. This will require deeper commitment. To what? Your healing! Living your purpose! Discovering the magic of living in a human body!

The rest of this newsletter will outline upcoming programs in 2026. The next newsletter will share the map of 2027 constellations.

It’s an exciting time that feels slightly perilous. I don’t think we are imagining that dichotomy. Through the grounding of our therapeutic and contemplative practices we will generate the internal sense of wholeness required to navigate the fog. We light the beacons within to illuminate the way and together join our lights into a luminous constellation that reflects the celestials above.

Fall 2026 Offerings:

5 Elements of Healing: A Comparative Framework for Multidimensional Health

September 5-November 28, Saturdays 9-11am CT/ 3-5pm BST

Liberation Lab

September 8-29, Tuesdays, 12-2pm CT/ 6-8pm BST

Meditation Week

September 20-26, Daily, 7-8am CT/ 1-2pm BST

Fall Goddess Portal - Online or Türkiye Retreat

October 11-20, Daily

Ethics: Power, Healing and Cultural Responsibility for Bodyworkers

November 1-22, Sundays 10-12pm CT/ 4-6pm BST

Reinventing Grief

November 1-December 6, Sundays, 1-3pm CT/ 7-9p BST

Four Winds,

Yoli

PS- Enjoy this Yoga Nidra practice from 2025 - Rematriation Celebration Nidra

5 Elements of Healing: A Comparative Framework for Multidimensional Health

Dates: Sept 5 – Nov 28, 2026

Saturdays, 9-11am CT/ 3-5pm BST

Learn to recognize the natural qualities that shape multidimesional wellbeing while cultivating the diagnostic intelligence to perceive the whole person.

Focus: Diagnostic intelligence · Pattern recognition · Nature qualities · Comparative healing systems

Prerequisites:

Sacred Cosmology Parts 1 & 3

Develop Personal Medical Intuition (Navigating Chronic Conditions)

Meditation Series 6

Explore 5 Elements

Sacred Cosmology of the Body

What if healing isn’t something to achieve, but a relationship to remember? Sacred Cosmology of the Body is a four-part journey (16 classes total) into the foundations of healing, inviting you to explore body, nature, ancestry, and the living world through Indigenous wisdom, Yoga Nidra, and comparative healing traditions. Whether you’re seeking personal transformation or preparing for professional practice, this is where the journey begins.

Sacred Cosmology Courses

Series I: Learning to See

Discover a living understanding of the body as an intelligent expression of nature. Through Yoga Nidra, contemplative practice, and cross-cultural wisdom, you’ll begin cultivating the perceptual foundation upon which the rest of the journey unfolds.

Series II: Learning to Live in Harmony

Explore the rhythms that sustain health through breath, seasons, relationship, and the body’s natural cycles. Healing becomes less about fixing and more about participating in the intelligent movements of life.

Series III: Learning to Live in Harmony

Explore the rhythms that sustain health through breath, seasons, relationship, and the body’s natural cycles. Healing becomes less about fixing and more about participating in the intelligent movements of life.

Series IV: Learning to Embody Wisdom

Bring the teachings into everyday life through ritual, creativity, reciprocal relationship, and embodied practice. The journey culminates not in acquiring more knowledge, but in living differently.

2026 Immersive Retreats with Yoli

Temple of the Goddess Turkiye Pilgrimage

October 11-21, 2026

10 days to travel down the Aegean Coast visiting sacred sites of the Goddess while resting in the lap of the Mother during the Fall Goddess Portal

October 22-26, 2026

5 Day Adventure Add-on to immerse in Sufi tradition at the seat of Mevlana Rumi in Konya then travel to the world heritage site of Cappadocia to adventure in underground cities and ride hot air balloons.

Learn more

2026 Course Schedule- Plan Your Year

A year of Intuitive Creative Arts in 3 seasons:

The Five Elements of Healing: Symptom and Pathology (Sept 5-Nov 28)

Women’s/Femme Spaces in 2026 - Retreat Style!

Rematriation Pilgrimage: Turkiye - Oct 11-21 (for the Fall Goddess Portal)

Goddess Portals:

Fall Goddess Portal - October 11-20

Decolonization Praxis:

Liberation Lab - September 8-29, online

Ethics in Practice: Power, Healing and Cultural Responsibility for Bodyworkers - Sundays, November 1-22, 10-12p CT, online / CE Credit

Liberation Praxis Leadership Training 2027 Waitlist

DEIcipher Group

Liberation Lab

September 8-29, Online

Inspired by the organizational powers of the natural world, we travel into the heart of DEI - the landscape of belonging. A deeply personal experience, how do we authentically generate the possibility that our teams and organizations can model the systems of living organisms?

Liberation Lab is an opportunity to see what Liberation Praxis is all about and to get started on your journey NOW.

Learn more

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What follows is a written transmission inspired by our recent Moon Circle. Rather than a word-for-word transcript, it gathers the central themes, images, and invitations from our time together into a form that can be read slowly and returned to often.

Paid subscribers receive access to the complete Moon Circle recording, where the full teaching, seasonal context, embodied practices, and unfolding conversation can be experienced in their original rhythm. Whether you choose to read, listen, or move between both, may this offering meet you exactly where you are.

Subscribe now

Greetings, friends.

There was a moment during our New Moon Solar Eclipse circle when the room became very quiet. Not because there was nothing left to say, but because the eclipse itself seemed to ask something different of us.

Not more information.

Not another strategy.

Just... stillness.

For much of this summer we’ve been asking difficult questions. We’ve examined our purpose. We’ve wondered who we are becoming. Many of us have walked alongside grief, uncertainty, endings, and the strange feeling that the old world no longer fits while the new one has not yet arrived.

This eclipse does not ask us to solve any of that.

It asks us to put the work down.

In Jyotish, eclipses are not moments for forcing life forward. They are thresholds. The ordinary rhythm of the world pauses while another kind of intelligence becomes available. This particular eclipse is infused with profound spiritual energy, inviting us away from productivity and toward prayer, dreaming, listening, and deep restoration.

The landscape surrounding this moon is Ashlesha Nakshatra, the realm of the coiled serpent.

The serpent has never simply symbolized danger. Across many wisdom traditions, it is the keeper of transformation, medicine, hidden knowledge, and renewal. It sheds what no longer belongs to it without resentment. It understands that growth does not come from adding more, but from releasing what has become too small.

Perhaps that is the invitation before us.

Not to become someone new.

But to finally let go of who we have already outgrown.

As we gathered together, another pattern revealed itself.

This eclipse arrives alongside the quiet turning of the seasons. Even if the calendar still calls it summer, nature has already begun to pivot. The exuberant outward energy of the season is beginning to soften toward grounding. Many traditional healing systems recognize this brief in-between time as sacred. Before autumn asks us to descend, we are given an opportunity to root ourselves.

To settle.

To cool the excess heat we’ve accumulated.

To remember the earth beneath our feet.

The Vedic month of Shravan echoes this same wisdom. It is a season devoted not to launching new ventures, but to spiritual practice. To simplicity. To Shiva. To allowing the deeper currents of life to rearrange us before we rush ahead.

There is extraordinary freedom in discovering that not every season is meant for building.

Some seasons are meant for listening.

Some are meant for dreaming.

Some are meant for allowing life to clear away what we could never have cleared through effort alone.

That is the quiet medicine of an eclipse.

As our circle came to a close, I found myself returning again and again to one image.

The serpent.

Patient.

Coiled.

Perfectly still.

Not because nothing is happening.

Because everything is.

May this eclipse meet you gently.

May what is leaving depart without unnecessary struggle.

May what is emerging find spacious ground in which to grow.

And may you trust that the pauses in life are never empty.

They are where Spirit does some of its finest work.

Where Is This Eclipse Moving Through Your Life?

The sky belongs to all of us, but we do not experience its movements in exactly the same way.

This eclipse is part of a larger collective story of shedding, transition, and transformation. Your birth chart reveals where that story is touching your life: what may be asking to loosen, what is coming to completion, and where you are being invited into a different relationship with purpose, timing, and possibility.

If you find yourself at a threshold, wondering what season you are in or simply wanting a little more orientation for the road ahead, I offer individual Jyotish readings as a space to listen more closely.

Not to predict what happens next.

To better understand the time you are living through, and how you want to meet it.

Explore Astrology Readings

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What follows is a written transmission inspired by our recent Moon Circle. Rather than a word-for-word transcript, it gathers the central themes, images, and invitations from our time together into a form that can be read slowly and returned to often.

Paid subscribers receive access to the complete Moon Circle recording, where the full teaching, seasonal context, embodied practices, and unfolding conversation can be experienced in their original rhythm. Whether you choose to read, listen, or move between both, may this offering meet you exactly where you are.

Subscribe now

We gather at a Full Moon junction.

Outside, midsummer is behaving like midsummer: heat gathering in the air, thunder shaking the horizon, rain descending in sheets. The sky darkens until the familiar world takes on the colors of warning. Trees bend. Winds whip. The weather radio waits nearby, just in case.

Then the storm passes.

The sky turns blue again. Birds descend into the newly formed puddles, bathing and feasting on whatever the rain has coaxed from beneath the ground. The world resumes, refreshed and rearranged.

We watch all of this from behind our walls.

Modern life has become very skilled at protecting us from interruption. Even when the sky is black and the trees are being thrown about, the internet remains connected. The work continues. The to-do list survives. We are rarely required to stop.

But the Moon remembers that we are nature.

And tonight, she asks us to pause.

We enter the circle from the sacred lands of the Sauk, Fox and Potawatomi peoples, and the ancient mound-building peoples who lived here before them. We arrive inside the luminous window of the Full Moon, allowing ourselves a moment to remember the wider rhythms of the human experience: the rising and falling, the openings and contractions, the storms and the blue skies that follow.

This Full Moon arrives in Shravana Nakshatra, the lunar mansion whose symbol is the ear.

Its medicine is listening.

Not casual listening.
Not listening while preparing our response.
Not listening only for affirmation of who we already believe ourselves to be.

Shravana asks for quiet, deep, sacred listening.

We listen for what is being whispered between the obvious things. We listen beneath the shouting of the news, the markets and the social media feed. We listen beneath the great performance of individual identity, where everyone is declaring me, me, me into an already crowded atmosphere.

We listen for the voice of the sacred.

We listen to the body.
We listen to the land.
We listen to our kin.
We listen to the ancestors.
We listen toward the great silence beneath creation.

Can we make ourselves into a receptive atmosphere for what is trying to come through?

The Moon of the Teacher

This Full Moon is also Guru Purnima, the Moon of the teachers.

The guru is not merely the person who gives us answers. The true teacher is the spiritual friend who helps us illuminate our own shadowed places and discover the light already living within us.

No teacher can awaken us on our behalf.

Meditation may be a method. Yoga may be a method. Martial arts, ritual, prayer, plant medicine and study may all become methods. But the awakening itself remains our responsibility.

This returns us to one of the central questions of the circle:

Who or what do you serve?

What larger purpose gives structure to your practice?

What keeps your spiritual life from becoming another instrument of individual ambition?

What are you collaging all these beautiful methods onto?

The culture around us encourages us to make the self into the ultimate project. My healing. My purpose. My expansion. My success. Yet the Moon sits in Saturn-ruled Capricorn, the realm of the collective, responsibility, maturation and the structures through which life is sustained.

You matter.

Your life matters.

But you are not here only to reinforce your individual identity or pursue an endless succession of personal goals. Life is asking you to remember relationship, belonging and responsibility.

Pluto at the Threshold

The Moon is closely joined by Pluto in Capricorn.

Pluto dredges the bottom.

It exposes what has been hidden beneath institutions, governments, families, relationships and identities. It brings secrets into the light, though exposure alone does not tell us what to do next.

We are living through a time of relentless revelation. Systems are breaking open. Things we once suspected are becoming impossible to ignore. Yet daily life continues to demand that we churn, produce and perform as though nothing fundamental has changed.

When too many structures begin to break down at once, an unsettling question emerges:

Who or what am I churning for?

Many people will reach for distraction.

We may reach for substances, food, sex, entertainment, consumption or any experience that allows us to feel briefly euphoric while remaining numb to what hurts. We want to feel alive without having to feel everything.

The alternative offered by this Moon is devotion.

Reach for source energy.
Reach for bhakti.
Reach for a practice that reconnects you to what is sacred.

Not because devotion removes the confusion, but because it clarifies the direction in which you are willing to travel.

Pluto is often described as destruction, but in the circle we encounter another image:

Pluto is compost.

What has fallen apart is not necessarily wasted. What is decomposing may be feeding a future form that has not yet revealed itself.

So we ask:

What truth has been quietly decomposing beneath the surface?

What old version of you has completed its work?

What are you still trying to preserve even as it disintegrates in your hands?

This is not an invitation to scorch the earth. Saturn does not want careless destruction. Saturn wants maturation. Saturn wants discernment. Saturn asks us to put the wisdom of our lived experience to work.

The question is not simply, What is mine and what is not mine?

The deeper question is:

Which responsibilities are keeping an older identity alive?

Which responsibilities genuinely nourish your life?

Which ones are performative?

Who are you performing for?

And does that audience even belong to the life you are living now?

Emotional Honesty

With the Moon and Pluto together, we might expect crashing waves of emotional intensity.

Yet the feeling of this lunation is quieter.

Old emotional material may bubble upward from the depths, but there may be very little to do about it. We are not being asked to force a resolution, construct a lesson or hurriedly transform pain into productivity.

We are being asked to listen in presence.

This is not necessarily emotional intensity.

It is emotional honesty.

A truth can arrive quietly and still carry enormous force.

A relationship is complete.
A role has become too small.
An ambition no longer belongs to you.
A responsibility has turned into performance.
A version of yourself has been outgrown.

No crashing cymbals. No dramatic exit.

Just the unmistakable sound of truth.

Belonging Beyond Achievement

A deep tiredness moves through the circle.

It is the tiredness of crossing a desert at night, where the air is damp and foggy but the land remains dry. We keep moving, though the path is unclear and our internal batteries are not showing full bars.

This exhaustion is not only personal.

It is a leadership issue.

The hero model of leadership is failing. The achievement model is exhausting. Leadership built around individual brilliance, endless output and the singular person carrying everyone else cannot sustain the future trying to emerge.

Leadership liberated from achievement becomes something else.

A belonging model.
A collaborative model.
A regenerative model.

We should not have to work to earn belonging.

And yet many of us have learned to labor toward it. We over-function in relationships. We become indispensable in communities. We perform usefulness in the hope that usefulness will become love.

This Moon asks us to notice the difference between belonging and trying to make belonging happen.

Where are you misplacing responsibility because you are attempting to skip ahead to connection?

Where have you confused achievement with worthiness?

Where are you proving yourself to people who are not participating in the relationship you are trying to preserve?

Sometimes the mature response is not to work harder.

Sometimes the mature response is to step back and allow what is dissolving to dissolve.

Let it compost.

Listening to the Silence Beneath Sound

Shravana’s presiding deity is Vishnu, the great preservative principle.

Vishnu does not preserve everything indiscriminately. Vishnu preserves what supports the evolution of life. He harmonizes the rough sea of worldly existence and removes the impediments that prevent the soul from continuing its journey.

In the sacred imagery, Vishnu reclines upon the cosmic serpent in Yoga Nidra, resting in the liminal waters between creation and dissolution.

This is a clue.

The guidance we need may not come from greater effort. It may arrive through dream, meditation, rest, silence, intuition and the threshold spaces where the ordinary personality becomes less dominant.

Shravana listens toward nada, the cosmic sound arising from primordial silence.

We do not listen merely with the physical ear.

We listen with the entire field of the body.

We listen for the parts of ourselves that have been waiting patiently for our attention.

We ask:

Have I stopped listening to some essential part of myself?

Do I need more silence rather than more advice?

What wisdom keeps returning?

What has been said softly because it does not wish to compete with the noise?

There is humility in this kind of listening.

We do not demand immediate answers. We allow ourselves to become available.

The Jolt of Embodiment

The Full Moon and Pluto receive earthy support from Mars and Uranus in Taurus.

There is a spark moving through the ground.

A jolt.
A zap.
An embodied activation.

Uranus brings revolution, innovation and the possibility of sudden change. Mars brings tenacity and the willingness to act. Taurus insists that whatever arrives must become tangible.

The insight cannot remain floating in the atmosphere.

It must enter the body.

It must change a habit, a structure, a relationship or a way of leading.

This is not necessarily a dramatic revolution. It may be the revolution of consistency. The revolution of building slowly. The revolution of creating structures that do not require our exhaustion to survive.

The old leadership model burns people out.

The new model must know how to regenerate.

What Are You Ready to Become Responsible For?

Full Moons are often framed as opportunities to release.

There is release here. Old identities, false obligations and exhausted structures are already entering the compost pile.

But the Capricorn Moon asks another question.

What are you ready to become responsible for?

Not responsible for because someone assigned it to you.

Not responsible for because carrying it makes you appear worthy.

Not responsible for because you fear what will happen if you stop holding everything together.

What are you ready to become responsible for because your deepest listening has revealed that it is yours to tend?

A relationship.
A practice.
A community.
A body.
A piece of land.
A lineage.
A vision.
A truth.

The Moon does not offer easy answers tonight.

She offers an ear.

She asks us to become quiet enough to hear the universal sound beneath the endless shouting. She asks us to listen to our bodies, our ancestors and the Earth in service of releasing what is no longer needed and preserving what is still alive.

We leave the circle with the blessings of Jupiter and the tenacity of Mars.

We do not sit back on our heels.

We descend into the quiet.
We listen for what is true.
We allow the old forms to compost.
And when the whisper becomes clear, we step toward it.

Not to prove ourselves.

Not to earn our belonging.

But because we have remembered who and what we serve.

An Invitation

The sky is always speaking to all of us. A personal astrology reading invites us to discover how that larger conversation is uniquely unfolding through your own life. Rather than predicting your future, these sessions are designed to help you cultivate relationship with your own sacred timing, illuminating the themes, transitions, and invitations that are already present. If you're feeling called to explore your chart more deeply, I invite you to book a reading and continue the conversation.

Astrology Reading with Yoli

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I returned to the place where the decades of teachings that came before merged, and in the crucible of the pandemic Sacred Cosmology of the Body was birthed. I remember sitting on my back porch in April 2020 communing with the trees when the download for the sixteen classes came through. I wondered if anyone would sign up for something so long but felt comforted that it was broken into four parts and one could sign up individually.

We ran Sacred Cosmology of the Body three times: 2020, 2021, & 2022. It’s where I met so many of you! We heard the call to rest into healing and reside in the liminal while humanity’s timeline took a hard shift onto another track. We didn’t stop there though, and so many delightful digital gardens emerged from 2020 until now.

To go back into the depths of that material, from the perspective of six years of growth built on this foundation of concepts was profound. I spent a week with the transcripts, each remembrance a celebration of ancestral and Indigenous wisdom. Insert one of those sayings here…....’you can’t go forward without going back’ or something of that ilk. The mercurial review process acted as a magical fortification process where the innovations of the now and future were made stronger by going back and re-weaving the foundation concepts with their current evolution.

Time is nonlinear after all. What appears as a circle is also a spiral that can flow in both directions and still hold its shape. Maybe like adding a line while knitting or patching a hole in denim, the final product is something different from the inception and wildly unique to its original DNA.

I’m quite happy to be able to re-present Sacred Cosmology of the Body curriculum now available as individual series and full series. There are reflection questions and integration activity offerings to support the internalization of what might feel like radical concepts– because they awaken and delight. Series I and III are prerequisite courses for the upcoming 5 Elements of Healing, our final course in the Professional Level Series in 2026.

Please share Sacred Cosmology of the Body course with your people. It’s a perfect entryway to Beauty Way Healing Arts alongside the Meditation Seriesand other Fundamentals of Healing short courses. I am working in the background to have all the courses named above plus all the Ancestor Series available for download by September.

**If you took Sacred Cosmology of the Body in 2020, 2021 or 2022, in celebration of our co-creative space, I would like you to have access to the updated materials in the mighty network digital garden. It makes it so easy to go back over materials, deepen the experience and rest in the magical Yoga Nidra practices. Just email me and I’ll send you an access link! yolimaya@gmail.com

Additional Updates:

The final event in our DEIcipher Summer Series is our Collective Liberation Retreat on Saturday, August 8th in Lily Lake, WI. If you are in town I would like to invite you to a Beauty Way Healing Arts Community Gathering at my home in Evanston, IL on Friday, August 7th from 4-7pm. Please RSVP with me - yolimaya@gmail.com. If you are on this newsletter list— you are invited! You are part of this Beauty Way healing field.

Shiatsu sessions are available ongoing in Evanston, IL Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

The next online Liberation Lab is September 8-29, running Tuesdays from 12-2pm CT. More details down below.

Mark your calendars for September Meditation Week coinciding with the autumn/spring equinox portal. September 20-26. Included in the Monthly Membership or you can join as its own thing.

Also mark your calendars for an additional offering this year, a work I believe we are being called to do together– Reinventing Grief - Sundays, 1-3pm CT/ 7-9pm GMT, November 1-December 6 (6 classes total).

Four Winds,

Yoli

PS- Enjoy this Yoga Nidra practice from the vaults: Interconnected Web of Life Nidra recorded December 16, 2021.

Sacred Cosmology of the Body

What if healing isn’t something to achieve, but a relationship to remember? Sacred Cosmology of the Body is a four-part journey (16 classes total) into the foundations of healing, inviting you to explore body, nature, ancestry, and the living world through Indigenous wisdom, Yoga Nidra, and comparative healing traditions. Whether you’re seeking personal transformation or preparing for professional practice, this is where the journey begins.

Info on Sacred Cosmology

Series I: Learning to See

Discover a living understanding of the body as an intelligent expression of nature. Through Yoga Nidra, contemplative practice, and cross-cultural wisdom, you’ll begin cultivating the perceptual foundation upon which the rest of the journey unfolds.

Series II: Learning to Live in Harmony

Explore the rhythms that sustain health through breath, seasons, relationship, and the body’s natural cycles. Healing becomes less about fixing and more about participating in the intelligent movements of life.

Series III: Learning to Live in Harmony

Explore the rhythms that sustain health through breath, seasons, relationship, and the body’s natural cycles. Healing becomes less about fixing and more about participating in the intelligent movements of life.

Series IV: Learning to Embody Wisdom

Bring the teachings into everyday life through ritual, creativity, reciprocal relationship, and embodied practice. The journey culminates not in acquiring more knowledge, but in living differently.

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5 Elements of Healing: A Comparative Framework for Multidimensional Health

Dates: Sept 5 – Nov 28, 2026

Saturdays, 9-11am CT/ 3-5pm BST

Learn to recognize the natural qualities that shape multidimesional wellbeing while cultivating the diagnostic intelligence to perceive the whole person.

Focus: Diagnostic intelligence · Pattern recognition · Nature qualities · Comparative healing systems

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Sacred Cosmology Parts 1 & 3

Develop Personal Medical Intuition (Navigating Chronic Conditions)

Meditation Series 6

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October 11-21, 2026

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A year of Intuitive Creative Arts in 3 seasons:

The Five Elements of Healing: Symptom and Pathology (Sept 5-Nov 28)

Women’s/Femme Spaces in 2026 - Retreat Style!

Rematriation Pilgrimage: Turkiye - Oct 11-21 (for the Fall Goddess Portal)

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Fall Goddess Portal - October 11-20

Decolonization Praxis:

Liberation Lab - September 8-29, online

Ethics in Practice: Power, Healing and Cultural Responsibility for Bodyworkers - Sundays, November 1-22, 10-12p CT, online / CE Credit

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What follows is a written transmission inspired by our recent Moon Circle. Rather than a word-for-word transcript, it gathers the central themes, images, and invitations from our time together into a form that can be read slowly and returned to often.

Paid subscribers receive access to the complete Moon Circle recording, where the full teaching, seasonal context, embodied practices, and unfolding conversation can be experienced in their original rhythm. Whether you choose to read, listen, or move between both, may this offering meet you exactly where you are.

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We gathered just beyond the dark of the Moon, after the portal had quietly opened. The urgency of the world softened for a while as we settled into the generous stretch of midsummer, noticing how the season itself invites us to loosen our grip. Summer has become expansive now. Days blur into one another. Plans become more fluid. Life asks less for certainty and more for participation.

Together we remembered that time can be measured in more ways than calendars and deadlines. Across cultures and ancestral traditions, the turning of the seasons has always offered its own instructions. As the Sun prepares to enter sidereal Cancer, we stand at the threshold of the year’s inward journey, a season that quietly turns our attention from building the outer world toward cultivating the inner one. These currents are always available. The invitation is simply whether we choose to enter them.

The New Moon arrived in Punarvasu, the luminous nakshatra of return. Its name speaks of becoming again, of the ray of light that finds its way back after wandering. Under the care of the goddess Aditi, the boundless cosmic mother, we were reminded that healing is rarely about becoming someone else. It is the slow remembering of what has always lived within us.

The sky itself reflects this gentle paradox. Jupiter shines with extraordinary promise while hidden in combustion. Mercury retraces its steps through retrograde, asking us to revisit rather than rush ahead. This is not a season of forcing. It is a season of listening. Some blessings are already arriving, even if they have not yet taken visible form.

Throughout the circle we returned again and again to a simple Beauty Way understanding: the heavens are not separate from us. The planets are not issuing commands. They are participating in an ancient conversation, mirroring the relationships that already exist within our own lives. Astrology becomes less about prediction and more about remembering ourselves through the language of the cosmos.

The symbols of Punarvasu offered another quiet teaching. The house is a place of return, where creative life is restored before continuing its journey. The bow is full of potential, but it does not choose the direction of the arrow. That belongs to the one who holds it.

So too with this Moon.

The conditions are becoming fertile.
The inspiration is gathering.
The creative current is moving.

But life is not happening to us.

We are participants in its unfolding.

As the evening drew to a close, the invitation became beautifully simple. Spend time with beauty. Create without needing to produce. Wander. Touch the earth. Let your hands make something. Listen for the ideas that arrive only when there is enough spaciousness to receive them. Trust that what appears quiet on the surface may be preparing extraordinary growth beneath it.

We also turned our attention toward the remarkable celestial alignment approaching later this month, sensing that this New Moon is less an ending than an opening. Something larger is taking shape, both collectively and personally. Before the world reorganizes itself, the imagination does.

Perhaps this is the quiet work of the season.

To become spacious enough for inspiration to land.

To remember that healing unfolds through relationship.

To trust that what is returning is not something new, but something ancient within us asking to be lived once again.

May this New Moon restore your courage to begin again.

May it return you to your own inner radiance.

May you become, once more, the ray of light you have always been.

Continue the Conversation

The Moon offers us a collective rhythm. Your birth chart reveals how that rhythm is uniquely alive within your own life.

If this reflection stirred something in you, I invite you to explore it more deeply through a Sidereal Astrology Reading. Together we’ll look at your natal chart, the cycles you’re currently moving through, and the invitations this season is offering. These sessions are not about predicting your future. They are about helping you recognize the deeper patterns, relationships, and timing already unfolding, so you can move through life with greater clarity and trust.

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The year is 2030, and it’s opening night at a highly anticipated novel exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, that unveils a new marriage of archive history and AI. Titled “Speak with an Ancestor” the interactive experience includes a groundbreaking technology where the consciousness of an ancestor is channeled through an artificial intelligence program. The interaction is not AI generated. This is a spirit oracle where the essence of a once-living human inhabits the system, using it as a speaking vessel—bridging ancestral memory and modern technology.

In attendance is a who’s who of the Black American diaspora including rap artist Kendrick Lamar who makes a beeline for Speak with an Ancestor and requests to converse with James Baldwin. As Lamar places the settings on the dial, the first thing to pop up on the screen is a short Biography of James Baldwin reading:

Born in 1924, a novelist, critical thinker and creative whose ideas wove themselves into the fabric of America in a time when being a gay, black man left one in the margins of society. A youth pastor in his teens, his passion for powerful words impacted audiences throughout his life through sharp wit and a keen eye for describing social systems of oppression in his time that still ring true today. He was an educator who added to the annals of liberation through the arts and a central message that the internal landscape is the frontier of transformation of systems of oppression.

The words then dissolve and James Baldwin’s 3-D image appears.

Baldwin: Ah, Kendrick Lamar. You were born in 1987, in a country that had already decided who you were meant to be, and in a place—Compton—that America has learned to fear without understanding, like my Harlem. You grew up inside its contradictions, and rather than escape them, you have chosen to speak them aloud. You are, in your way, a preacher—your pulpit a beat, your testimony carried in rhythm and rupture. What compels me is your refusal to be simplified; you insist on bringing your contradictions into the light. This is the artist’s burden: to make the world more truthful than it wishes to be, and to risk oneself in the telling. I have been waiting for someone willing to speak as you do.

Lamar: Sounds like you know me, but I don’t claim to be a conduit of anyone’s salvation. As I say in Savior, don’t confuse the one who can name the condition with the one who can deliver you from it…

“The cat is out the bag, I am not your savior

I find it just as difficult to love thy neighbors

Especially when people got ambiguous favors

But they hearts not in it, see, everything’s for the paper” (Savior, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers)

But I have a question I think you can help me with in my evolution as an artist: How do you tell the truth about what this country has done to you, without letting that truth become the only story you know about yourself?

Baldwin: Like you said, you are no one’s savior. It is your job as a storyteller to tell the truth, but the truth of what’s been done to you by society, by systemic disenfranchisement, is not the sum of who you are. As a Black man, there’s a danger in the lie that’s being told to you as well as what happens if you start to believe the lie and allow it to define your limits. My uncle once wrote to me and said, “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger” (The Fire Next Time, 3).

The contradictions you name in your music are describing your reality and your suffering, but this is not your only inheritance. America would have you believe that your pain is your identity if only for you to forget the strength of the ancestors and how you have been prayed for. You said in your song Man at the Garden:

Pray for those who prayed against me

Every reason why my ancestors sent me

Bitch, I deserve it all (Man at the Garden, GNX)

I get it. If you don’t name that you deserve it all, the world will gladly erase it for you. Remain rooted that you are not a solution, you are a witness. Protect your humanity. Feel the rage alongside the tenderness. Feel the despair and also the joy but be aware of surrendering your humanity in response to injustice. “Hatred which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated”. I said this is my book Notes of a Native Son (114).

Lamar: I feel like our spiritual journeys have a similar resonance. We both came up in the rhythms of call and response in the church, but knew it as a place where some things just didn’t quite fit. “[The church] was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair.” (The Fire Next Time, 39). You left the pulpit after refusing to acknowledge a God who justifies oppression and I choose to interrogate from the inside:

Why God, why God, do I gotta suffer?

Pain in my heart carry burdens full of struggle

Why God, why God, do I gotta bleed?

Every stone thrown at you restin’ at my feet (FEAR, DAMN)

Baldwin: But we don’t abandon spirituality, we relocate it. For you the confession, the therapy, the self-examination all become your practice. For me, interior life becomes the site of truth, love and liberation. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live with” (The Fire Next Time, 95). The stories of the transformational landscapes of our spirituality are our contribution to religious education—because education, if it is to be meaningful, must teach people how to confront reality without losing themselves in it. The story remains a powerful mechanism for learning and an ancestral technology. My narratives live in my books and essays and yours in your songs. My work resisted the lie of American innocence. Yours resists the commodification of Black suffering. Both, in their own way, attempt to re(form) a world where truth is not punished.

Lamar: I’m just trying to face myself fully– and that’s the only way forward. I’m a Black man born in America. The odds were already stacked against me while I rested in the womb of my mother. I remember the words you wrote in The Fire Next Time, “You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” (The Fire Next Time, 7)

Baldwin: You are doing something with your music that I want to celebrate. You’re not trying to make ‘nice art’. You are layering a moral interrogation like in “Blacker the Berry” and “Alright” that relentlessly questions: What have we done to each other? What have we done to ourselves? Your vocal sound performs multiplicity—shifting voices, characters and internal dialogues while it communicates rage and self-critique, survival and complicity and a hope that feels earned, not handed out. As you profess, you are no preacher and you are not handing out redemption. The best part, your music celebrates blackness in a way that I simply adore.

Your truth speaking is your superpower. You are truly embodying W.E.B Dubois’ concept of ‘double consciousness’ as the engine of your voice. You give us both the internal self and the gaze that distorts it. You perform it for us in the shifts between confidence and self-doubt and when your pride collides with critique. Now the real question to be asked is, “Who benefits from your divisions?”

I mean, you walked us through this in the Super Bowl performance. My man Samual L. Jackson as American Uncle Sam, the things he interrogates and when you finally earn his respectability approval when the sound is soft and sexy. There are so many things I could say about these moments but I’ll stay here with my point– your multiplicity is your brilliance but at what point does performing fragmentation risk becoming trapped inside it?

Lamar: While I might not have the answers to your question because I am still in my process, and like you said, celebrating my wins with my community, I do want my art to move me towards wholeness and not just put black trauma porn on display for the white audience.

Baldwin: I’m happy to hear you say that. I see how your music is ‘by us, for us’ while at the same time is marketed to a massive global audience. But here’s my big concern— as you know at the heart of my work was defining the constructs of blackness and whiteness and working out the so-called Negro problem of my generation’s experience. I find the use of the n-word as the people of today say, or don’t, inherently problematic.

I get what it has become: inside the community it is fluid, relational and giving new meaning. Outside the community it is still a word that is loaded with violence. Every time you use this word, you are building intimacy and carrying historical harm. In this tension I get curious – can a word born in domination ever be fully liberated? Or does it always echo the gaze that created it?

Lamar: You said in Notes to a Native Son, “One writes out of one thing only– one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” (Notes to a Native Son,7)

Baldwin: I did then go on to say, “I do think, since writers work in the disastrously explicit medium of language , that it goes a little way towards explaining why, out of the enormous resources of Negro speech and life, and despite the example of Negro music, prose written by Negros has been generally speaking so pallid and harsh.” (Notes of a Native Son, 8)

Lamar: Do you find my music harsh?

Baldwin: I find your music real. Life is harsh. I have also discovered that integration and wholeness rooted in love is the discovery underneath the struggle. You are at the point in your process you are in and its outcomes cannot be rushed. We both share a refusal to lie, a commitment to complexity and a willingness to expose internal contradictions.

We diverge in emphasis– I reach toward integration while you often dwell in exposure of fragmentation. I love how unwilling you are to fake it. I know you have the capacity to imagine wholeness, but you’re not going to put on a show that is not genuine to who you are– for any amount of profit. Here’s that ‘double consciousness’ I’m referring to again but in a later-stage form– in your latest album GNX you move on from narrating the conditions of Black life to managing visibility within those conditions. You are not just seeing yourself through other’s eyes but anticipating, editing and protecting yourself from those eyes.

So the concern underneath my concern is viewed from the place beyond the self construct: Where can you rest from being seen? Where does the self exist without an audience?

Lamar: It’s like we are a consciousness split by history.

Baldwin: Division is an experience of the human-realm. Oneness is the truth of existence.

Lamar: Did you learn that while you were still living?

Baldwin: No, death is a great revealer of the truths we have forgotten.

Remember these words from The Cross of Redemption, “Art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.” (The Cross of Redemption,4)

Lamar: You leave me with much to consider. In deep gratitude for this time James Baldwin.

–END of TRANSMISSION-

Programmer notes:

Through their stories, I was impacted by the possibility that religious education can be less about what to believe and more about how to be in truth. The journey is not as much about salvation and instead promotes an embodied responsibility, awareness and transformation. Here one interrogates inherited beliefs and confronts the realities of suffering and power. This participatory pedagogy orients liberation as both an internal and collective process. In this model, music, literature and lived experience function as primary theological texts. This dialogue redefines the field as a practice of critical, embodied, and culturally situated meaning-making. In this way, Religious Education becomes less about transmitting belief and more about cultivating the capacity to live truthfully within contradiction.

Bibliography

1. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage International, 1993.

2. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.

3. Baldwin, James. The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. New York: Vintage International, 2010.

4. Kendrick Lamar. Man at the Garden, GNX(2024). pgLang and Interscope Records.

5. Kendrick Lamar. Savior, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers (2022). pgLang and Interscope Records.

6. Kendrick Lamar. FEAR, DAMN (2017). Interscope Records.

References:

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What you’re reading here is a poetic transcription and synthesis of a recent Full Moon sermon, shaped to be received slowly and entered from wherever you are. Paid subscribers have access to the complete video recording of this circle, where the pacing, pauses, and embodied guidance of the live transmission can be felt more fully. Whether you’re reading or listening, you’re invited to engage this offering in a way that supports your own rhythm and attention.

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We gathered beneath a moon that seemed to hover just at the crest of becoming, suspended in that luminous moment between what has been and what is beginning to emerge. The Full Moon in Purva Ashadha arrived like sacred water, carrying the invitation to cleanse, soften, and remember.

The evening opened with an ancient truth: everything moves in cycles. The moon changes every two days. The seasons turn. Joy passes. Grief passes. Nothing remains fixed. We looked up to the heavens not as a mechanism of fate, but as a mirror. The celestial bodies do not command our lives. They reflect them back to us. They remind us that impermanence is not something to fear, but the rhythm that makes renewal possible.

As we sat together, we entered the deep waters of Purva Ashadha, the “Invincible One,” ruled by Venus and presided over by Apas, the cosmic waters. This is the moon of purification. Not punishment. Not perfection. Purification.

Its symbol is the winnowing basket.

The old farmers would toss the grain into the air and allow the wind to separate the nourishing seed from the husk. The moon asks us to do the same:

What is essential?
And what is merely the husk?

What beliefs have become indigestible? What identities have we outgrown? What truths are we avoiding because they will ask something of us?

The waters of this moon do not come to drown us. They come to wash our eyes.

Throughout the circle, there was a palpable sense that many of us are standing at the edge of profound inner change. The invitation of this moon is not outward striving but inward excavation. July itself feels like a sacred cave, asking us to tend the yin, to listen deeply, and to trust the intelligence of stillness.

We spoke of hope, too.

Of how the world often trains us to believe that we are powerless, that healing is impossible, that the future belongs to despair. Yet Sagittarius, the sign holding this moon, offers another story. It reminds us that meaning, faith, and philosophy are medicines. That we are not cogs in a machine, but participants in a living cosmos.

The circle became a collective remembering:

Drink water.

Take ritual baths.

Offer libation to the earth and to the ancestors.

Sit with your devotions.

Ask yourself what deserves your life force.

Then came one of the evening’s deepest questions:

What wants to be purified, not punished?

The room softened.

For so many of us, there are places in ourselves we have tried to fix, shame, or force into change. But Purva Ashadha whispers another possibility. Perhaps some things simply need cleansing. Perhaps they need gentleness, tears, and time.

As the evening unfolded, another story emerged.

Mercury had just stationed retrograde in Cancer, turning our attention toward memory, ancestry, and belonging. The Saraswati Yoga of Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury offered a rare current of beauty, wisdom, and eloquence. It felt as though old songs, forgotten teachings, and ancestral knowings were rising to the surface.

And then, just beyond the horizon, Rahu prepared to enter Dhanishta, the nakshatra of the sacred drum.

First the waters.

Then the remembering.

Then the drumbeat.

A new collective rhythm calling us forward.

The circle ended with a simple but profound invitation:

If you trusted life again, what would you devote yourself to?

Perhaps that is the medicine of this moon.

To let the river carry away what is no longer true.

To remember the wisdom already living inside us.

And to emerge from the waters clear enough to hear the drum that has been calling our name all along.

Astrology as a Practice of Trust

There are moments in life when something old is falling away, but the new rhythm has not yet fully arrived. We find ourselves asking deeper questions:

What am I devoted to?
What have I outgrown?
What truth is asking me to change?

An astrology reading is not about predicting your future. It is about orienting yourself within the season you are living. It is an opportunity to listen more closely to your soul’s timing, to understand the cycles unfolding in your relationships, work, creativity, and spiritual path, and to remember what is essential.

If this Full Moon stirred something in you, if you are standing at a threshold and longing to trust life again, I would be honored to sit with your chart and explore the wisdom your own celestial story is offering.

Sometimes the deepest medicine is remembering that you are not lost.

You are simply in a season of becoming, and the stars can help illuminate the path ahead

Astrology Readings with Yoli

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The words spoken to me at the age of 17 by my mentor/Goddess Ma, Blue Cloud Ma, just before I embarked on my first visit to the Cattaraugus Reservation to spend three months in the home of Grandmother Twylah Nitsch, Yewhennode – She Whose Voice Rides The Wind, the matriarch of the Seneca Wolf Clan, Haudanausawnee, Five Nations Confederacy. She would be the first significant mystic that I would spend time with in this phase of my young adult life and the time would be formative.

Just a few months ago, I sat in a room with new friends as I began my doctoral journey at Meadville Lombard Theological School. During the orientation we shared a reading of a sermon by the mystic elder Howard Thurman called the Sound of the Genuine. Sometimes called a nature mystic, Thurman’s earliest experiences in communion with the Divine were in nature. An oak tree nearby his home in Daytona Beach, Florida, or while out fishing on the Halifax river as a young boy. The Sound of the Genuine speaks to the unique inner truth, a resonance that arises when one is aligned with their deepest self. Thurman’s concept is inspired by the embodied truth of song within Black spiritual traditions, and offers a framework for understanding liberation as the process of aligning one’s life with an inner, divinely rooted authenticity that resists distortion under oppressive conditions.

At the orientation, we were listening to a recording of Thurman’s oral delivery of the sermon at a graduation ceremony at Spelman College in 1980, and this would be one of his final public messages before his passing on April 10, 1981. I was immediately struck by the cadence and intonation of his voice. It sounded so familiar, like how the elders in my mother’s family spoke in a soft southern drawl and unhurried pacing.

Something felt more familiar than just the rhythm of his voice. It felt familial, relational. Now, I am deeply in touch with my ancestor field and I have a 24/7 communications uplink with them. I called upon them for clarification, is this person an ancestor of my bloodline? There was a clear no, but an encouragement to keep digging. There was something there.

As the sermon continued, I found myself in the intuitive field of Howard Thurman. I thought to myself, “Indeed this person is a mystic. His field of consciousness endures and holds power.” Since he was there in a spirit/field of consciousness form I asked him directly if he was an ancestor. Again, the answer was no but an encouragement to keep digging.

This current semester a confluence of assignments led me down a deep dive with Howard Thurman. His views as a practitioner of spiritual arts and experience of direct insight makes him a key theologian for me to converse within in my exploration of an embodied praxis of liberation. Each book was an experience in his field. He became more and more familiar and easy to talk to. His teachings are quite simple because of his focus on inner cultivation, a pathway I am familiar with.

He also kept nagging that there was an ancestral element to still uncover. I was encouraged to speak to my mom about the family tree. What that conversation uncovered was that the Revered Jackson Jacob Thomas, a Methodist Minister as was Thurman, was the husband of the matriarch of my family that I was very close to before her passing when I was age eight – my Great Grandmother Willie Maude Davidson Thomas. With this nugget in hand I returned to Howard Thurman’s field and presented my findings.

“Was Revered Thomas a friend of yours?” The answer was yes! I felt relieved. Thurman chuckled and complemented my tenacity to not let the nagging quest go. What could follow would be research to see if there are any records that could prove this connection but I be honest, I don’t feel the need. My body is telling me that this is true and I have a deep sense of trust in that.

As my own mystic journey unfolds, time becomes increasingly non-linear in recognition of multiple cycles moving at their own speeds and in their own rhythms. This Howard Thurman project evoked recognition of a prophecy/instruction given to me by my mentor Blue Cloud Ma in the summer 2005. I had just returned from two more years in India with no idea of what I was doing in life’s next steps but deeply rooted in spiritual practice. I shared with her that I was interested in continuing to write a paper where I was comparing Native American and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. She suggested I reach out to a school called Meadville Lombard Theological School to see if their Master of Arts program was something that could accommodate my views. It was a big yes and in the fall of that year I began my academic journey.

Blue Cloud Ma had a vision one day during my first semester that was a message for me. In it, I was instructed to go deeply into the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Jesus, and Mahatma Gandhi in how they taught and embodied the teachings of non-violence. I tried to be as diligent as I could, exploring and reading books, sermons, and writings from the perspective of all three changemakers but the feeling that I had come to a big ah-ha moment of synergizing something significant didn’t really happen.

Fast forward to the past month as I digested the teachings and voice of Howard Thurman for my doctoral assignments. It’s 20+ years later and I think I figured it out. Thurman is a meeting place of nonviolence approach to social justice and liberation deeply rooted in the teachings of Jesus as a poor Jew who was marginalized in the society he was raised in, centered the downtrodden and spoke truth to power. In Thurman’s life he was deeply inspired by the spiritual and mundane-world principles of Mahatma Gandhi and had a fateful meeting with him while on a speaking tour in India in 1936. His relationship with Dr. King was that of a mentor. It is said that Dr. King carried around a copy of Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited with him everywhere.

What Thurman presents for us about nonviolence as an approach to resistance of systems of oppression that is so very important is all about the way of the mystics. He centers spiritual cultivation as the generative force for the grounding and power required to action resistance to harmful outer systems. He describes the transmutation of fear and hatred into a critical connection to the Divine/Source Energy/Creative Consciousness that functions as the fuel for longevity of movement for change.

Nonviolence as a social justice response is not just outward actions. It is the harmony of the inner and outer fortitude not cultivated in isolation but in a collective action of stilling the mind and spending time in contemplation. It sounds simple because most truths are. The invitation is for each and every one of us to become the mystic social justice participants of today, as we find ourselves in a unique predicament of outer systems decay and moral bankruptcy.

A limitless fortitude resides within, we only need to find our rhythms and sounds of authenticity to express our multiple truths through. The ancestors gave us the blueprint.

What follows is the paper I wrote exploring Howard Thurman as a liberatory figure and three core practices in his liberation pedagogy. Enjoy!

Stillness as Resistance: The Inner Life and Liberation in Howard Thurman

At the heart of the quest for collective liberation from harmful systems of oppression lives the embodied spiritual path. This path requires repetitive practice, time spent in solitude and generation of a connection to Divine/Source Energy in order to bolster inner resources. In the search for theologians to think alongside in the pursuit of describing a praxis for collective liberation, Howard Thurman stands as a theological ancestor and mystic of liberation.

He was not a loud influence, rather like groundwater deep beneath. His sermons and contemplative offerings hold clout to this day, which express a bridging of mysticism and social justice. This quiet architect of movement influenced so many names of Civil Rights lineage and his message was simple: inner life is central to liberation. “The disinherited will know for themselves that there is a Spirit at work in life and in the hearts of men which is committed to overcoming the world. It is universal, knowing no age, no race, no culture, and no condition of men. For the privileged and underprivileged alike, if the individual puts at the disposal of the Spirit the needful dedication and discipline, he can live effectively in the chaos of the present, the high destiny of a son of God.”

Born in 1899 in Daytona Beach, Florida, Thurman was raised in an environment where he had to work hard to obtain an education and where his focus and good fortune were allies. His grandmother, formerly enslaved, was a formative influence on his spirituality. Through grit and perseverance he made his way to Morehouse College and Rochester Theological Seminary. As an ordained Methodist minister and theologian he inspired a generation of spiritual leaders to embrace in the inner landscape of being while challenging oneself to dismantle inherited systems of oppression in the outer world.

With co-conspirators he founded an interracial church called the Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples in 1944 in San Francisco, California, when such an idea was radical to say the least. He left Fellowship Church in 1953 for an appointment as Dean of Marsh Chapel and Professor of Spiritual Disciplines and Resources at Boston University, in residence for twelve years. He returned to service at Fellowship Church later in his life. Thurman’s life and work tell a story of his commitment to service and to the teachings of Christ as well as his ever-evolving relationship with the Divine through daily encounters.

Thurman understood how oppression damages the psyche. He explored within himself and well as in Christian theology how systems of oppression can be disrupted. In reflection on the actions of Jesus, “He recognized with authentic realism that anyone who permits another to determine the quality of his inner life gives into the hands of the other the keys to his destiny.”

Fear, hatred and deception are tools of oppressors to keep the disinherited locked into control. What Thurman names as a core liberatory concept is the ability for the inner spirit to be liberated in the cultivation of an inner freedom. “The first task is to get the self immunized against the most radical results of the threat of violence. When this is accomplished, relaxation takes the place of the churning fear. The individual now feels that he counts, that he belongs. He senses the confirmation of his roots, and even death becomes a little thing.”

A second core concept of liberation for Thurman is love as a discipline of liberation. This is not a passive love, but rather the love required to refuse to replicate dominion. This love is not sentiment but strategy. It is a disciplined refusal to allow oppression to dictate the terms of one’s humanity. “The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value. This cannot be discovered in a vacuum or in a series of artificial or hypothetical relationships. It has to be in a real situation, natural, free.”

From the outer relational to the inner landscape, Thurman communicates a third core concept of liberation in his direct invitations to connect to the Divine. As he shared in his sermons and series on various mystics of the world, the spiritual and discovery of the ‘sound of the genuine’ is beyond institutional methods. “We are surrounded by an all-pervasive Spirit of God, which Spirit is the Creator of life and the world, and which Spirit is in me. And that Spirit which is in me is the real thing, and I can make direct contact with that Spirit without going outside myself.”

When the individual embarks on a path of self-discovery ignited by the possibility of liberation, then roots into a universal love as grounding, the way of the mystic unfolds. “Love does that for us, for it inspires in an individual what was a sleeping, relaxed sense of worth and value and meaning, and when this slumbering thing awakens, the kind of radiance that it circulates through all the corridors of one’s life makes the individual see in himself what he had never seen before. This, which the mystics are always talking about, is a little more than what is traditionally regarded as a conversion. It is the discovery of a new center around which increasingly all the details of the life are more and more organized.”

Thurman’s practice of the silence was reinforced during his studies with Quaker Theologian Rufus Jones at Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 1929. As a daily practice, inward turning into the meditation of silence and stillness remains a bedrock of Thurman’s embodied theology and social justice framework. It is here where the deep listening required to develop connection to the voice of the Divine meets the nervous system nurturance necessary for dismantling internalized systems of oppression. In his meditation “In Quiet One Discovers the Will of God”, Thurman invites the practitioner in consideration of life’s purpose to ground into “the simple assumption is, that God is in each one of us, a part of our very life structure, and we are in Him.” He goes on to describe what “begins to take shape within us as we seek to know the Will with all our hearts. Often, the will of God becomes apparent in the central concern of our spirits, which leads us to act or function in accordance with its urgency.”

Silence, stillness and meditation formed the foundation of Thurman’s nonviolence practice and a destined meeting with Mahatma Gandhi while on a speaking tour in India in 1936 further informed his understanding of nonviolence as a spiritual discipline. Beyond a political strategy, Thurman’s approach requires the transformation of fear and hatred within one’s self. “Hatred in the mind and spirit of the disinherited is born out of great bitterness– a bitterness that is made possible by sustained resentment which is bottled up until it distills an essence of vitality, giving to the individual in whom this is happening a radical and fundamental basis for self-realization.”

Thurman speaks of an inner alchemy in the engagement of fear and hatred as natural responses to systems of oppression and he explains that in a nonviolent response, an opportunity forms for transmutation. “When self-realization is established as a rallying point for the personality, is the tremendous source of dynamic energy provided. Surplus energy is created and placed at the disposal of the individual’s needs and ends.” The spiritual practice of nonviolence for Thurman is a healing pathway to informed transformative action.

Thurman is not the archetypical mystic hermit. Rather his practice of lived theology was at the heart of his ministry at the Church of the Fellowship of All Peoples. From 1944-1953, in a time of segregation, he co-stewarded this vibrant integrated spiritual community. A relational experiment, Fellowship Church broke ground on what could be if segregation was removed from the spiritual and social dimensions of a community. It was during this time that he penned Jesus and the Disinherited, his seminal work that inspired a generation of civil rights leaders to embody the way of Jesus as a social justice leader and nonviolence as an inner and outer spiritual grounding.

Shared in his autobiography, With Head and Heart, Thurman’s early experiences of God happened in nature. Out on a boat fishing on a river, amongst the Oak nearby his house or a moment of providence while witnessing the sunrise over the Khyber Pass in India, “Thurman would likely argue that an experience of God can happen anywhere: in nature, during worship, or while in private prayer.” His ‘harmony of creation’ was an embodied experience that gained richness in every encounter.

It is in this landscape I find myself bolstered by Thurman’s words and motivated by his diligence in practice, even in the face of hatred and fear. Spiritual cultivation is central to liberation and Thurman validates this truth of the need for formation of the inner authority. His view is a confirmation for me that there need not be a separation of the spiritual and political dimensions of transformative work and that there is space for the intuitive aspects of being to voice themselves.

Bringing Thurman into the landscape of collective struggle and liberation today feels both challenging and easeful. The pathway of practice is clear– time in the silence and the stillness and a soft restraint exercised towards the lower natures of greed, anger, hatred, fear, ignorance and delusion. The challenge resides in how to motivate people to slow down, to simplify their lives so that a space for this contemplative input can happen. While the pace of modernity moves at lightspeed, I cannot believe that the struggles of today are more difficult than living under the oppression of overt racism, segregation and sexism in Thurman’s time.

Thurman’s work deepens my understanding of Liberation Praxis as not only a framework for social transformation, but as a spiritual discipline rooted in the cultivation of inner freedom, relational integrity, and embodied awareness. With all the pressures of today, I am left with the question: how do we sustain inner freedom while participating in the long, unfinished work of collective liberation? I do not think it can happen in isolation but we will need to lean into relational ecologies of belonging that support cultivation of the inner authority.

Bibliography

Thurman, Howard. With Head and Heart ; the Autobiography of Howard Thurman. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979.

Brown, Lerita Colman. What Makes You Come Alive. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023.

Thurman, Howard. Meditations of the Heart. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston: Beacon Press, 2022.

Thurman, Howard. The Way of the Mystics. Edited by Peter R. Eisenstadt and Walter E. Fluker. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2021.

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I’ve been gifted a beautiful, cozy space to host healing clinic, in person events and of course continued online offerings. It feels like the spirits of the land have welcomed us home in partnership in the healing mission. Stabilization and grounding will allow for all the endeavors to root, for everyone in my little family unit. Deeeeeeeeep gratitude for the abundant blessings.

Come play and heal with me! Shiatsu Healing Clinic is running Mondays/Thursday/Saturdays in the loft here in South Evanston and DEIcipher is hosting a Summer Regenerative Series of events to build community and deepen our resources for transformation on all levels of being.

Friends who are outside of Chicago, please consider joining us for our Collective Liberation day-retreat on August 8th in Lily Lake, WI. There’s a few friends who are coming in for it and we can make a community gathering in the loft Friday, August 7th to enjoy together. Reach out anytime to discuss and links are above and below for more information.

We are in the midst of our first Liberation Lab cohort and is fiyah in that space! Mark your calendar for the next online offering running Tuesdays 12-2pm CT in September.

How is early summer landing for you? We are in the early part of the Summer Solstice portal and all the yang energy is palpable. This is the season of yin management– not letting the rest-stores burn down in the heat of the sun. Come join community members in June Meditation Week, June 21-27 for a week of Tending Burnout in Summer. Yin conservation. You can book the week as a separate experience or it’s included in the Monthly Membership. Reach out with questions anytime.

Four Winds,

Yoli

PS- A little nidra love that explores Healing Resonance in the form of How I Want to Feel Nidra.

June Meditation Week

Tending Burnout in Summer
A Meditation Week | June 21-27/ 7-8am CT/ 1-2 pm BST live + recordings

$79 or included inside Beauty Way Monthly Membership

The longest days of the year invite us outward. Yet beneath the brilliance of summer lies another teaching: protect the well from which you drink.

This week of meditation explores the art of cultivating coolness within heat, stillness within movement, and restoration within a season of abundance. Together, we will practice tending the inner waters that sustain vitality, creativity, and presence throughout the year.

More information below:

Click HERE if you are new to the Beauty Way Digital Garden

If you are returning to the garden click HERE

Summer Regeneration Series

Moon Feast + Nidra

June 28, 4-7pm at The Loft in South Evanston, IL

Wild Imagination: A Process Painting Workshop + Feast

July 19, 12:30-3:30pm at Art Makers Outpost, Evanston, IL

Collective Liberation Gathering

August 8, 2-10pm at Lily Lake, WI

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2026 Immersive Retreats with Yoli

Temple of the Goddess Turkey Pilgrimage

October 11-21, 2026

10 days to travel down the Aegean Coast visiting sacred sites of the Goddess while resting in the lap of the Mother during the Fall Goddess Portal

October 22-26, 2026

5 Day Adventure Add-on to immerse in Sufi tradition at the seat of Mevlana Rumi in Konya then travel to the world heritage site of Cappadocia to adventure in underground cities and ride hot air balloons.

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Astrology Services with Yoli

Astrology is not here to tell you who you are or what will happen to you.
It is here to help you locate yourself within time.

These astrology readings are a relational, consent-based practice—grounded in embodiment, intuition, and care. Rather than prediction or prescription, we listen to cycles, timing, and internal signals so that you can make choices that are aligned with your capacity, values, and truth.

This is astrology for thresholds, creativity, leadership, grief, and rest.
You remain the primary authority in your life.

Connect to Yoli’s regular astrology offerings on the Sacred Cosmology Substack

Threshold Reading

Astrology for Endings, Beginnings & Liminal Time

Vocation & Creative Timing Reading

Astrology for Calling, Work & Energy Stewardship

Year Ahead Orientation

Astrology for Cycles, Seasons & Choice-Making

Crisis and Care Reading

Astrology for Overwhelm, Shock & Disorientation

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2026 Course Schedule- Plan Your Year

A year of Intuitive Creative Arts in 3 seasons:

The Five Elements of Healing: Symptom and Pathology (Sept 5-Nov 28)

Women’s/Femme Spaces in 2026 - Retreat Style!

Rematriation Pilgrimage: Turkiye - Oct 11-21 (for the Fall Goddess Portal)

Goddess Portals:

Fall Goddess Portal - October 11-20

Decolonization Praxis:

Liberation Lab - September 8-29, online

Ethics in Practice: Power, Healing and Cultural Responsibility for Bodyworkers - Sundays, November 1-22, 10-12p CT, online / CE Credit

Liberation Praxis Leadership Training 2027 Waitlist

DEIcipher Group

Liberation Lab -September 8-29, Online

Inspired by the organizational powers of the natural world, we travel into the heart of DEI - the landscape of belonging. A deeply personal experience, how do we authentically generate the possibility that our teams and organizations can model the systems of living organisms?

Liberation Lab is an opportunity to see what Liberation Praxis is all about and to get started on your journey NOW.

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What you’re reading here is a poetic transcription and synthesis of a recent New Moon sermon, shaped to be received slowly and entered from wherever you are. Paid subscribers have access to the complete video recording of this circle, where the pacing, pauses, and embodied guidance of the live transmission can be felt more fully. Whether you’re reading or listening, you’re invited to engage this offering in a way that supports your own rhythm and attention.

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There was a softness in the room this month.

Not the softness of retreating from the world, but the softness that arrives when we realize we cannot force life to unfold. The June New Moon arrived at the very end of Taurus, at the final degree of a sign devoted to nourishment, beauty, pleasure, value, and the simple wisdom of tending what matters. It felt less like a beginning and more like standing at a threshold with one hand on a closing door and the other reaching toward what is next.

Throughout the circle, the invitation was clear: pause long enough to notice what has been ripening.

For the last month we have been gathering ingredients. Clarifying boundaries. Discovering what deserves our attention and what merely competes for it. The astrology suggested something rare and encouraging. Determination is available. Structure is available. Discernment is available. The heavens are not asking us to struggle our way forward. They are offering support.

At the center of the moon’s story stands Jupiter and Venus.

After months marked by heavier planetary influences, this cycle carries a different flavor. Jupiter, exalted and expansive, joins Venus in an atmosphere of creativity, learning, beauty, abundance, and grace. The feeling is one of possibility. Not frantic growth, but fertile growth. Not urgency, but confidence. The kind of season where inspiration arrives easily and where the Beauty Way feels less like an ideal and more like a lived experience.

Yet the circle continually returned to a surprising teaching:

Rest.

As the Northern Hemisphere approaches the Summer Solstice, we stand at the peak of solar power. The days stretch long. The flowers bloom. The cafés spill onto sidewalks. The body wants to move. To build. To create. To do. And yet traditional wisdom reminds us that solstice is not simply a celebration of maximum light. It is also a portal of renewal.

Just as winter invites deep restoration, summer asks us not to squander the reserves of yin we have carefully cultivated. The teaching was simple and profound: lower the gauge a little. Leave space in the calendar. Resist the temptation to spend all of your energy simply because it is available. The most sustainable creativity emerges from a rested nervous system.

The nakshatra of this moon, Mrigashira, offered another layer of medicine.

Its symbol is the antelope, the seeker.

The one who follows a scent through the forest.

The one who searches.

Mrigashira lives between Taurus and Gemini, between sensual embodiment and intellectual curiosity. It asks us to investigate both the world around us and the landscapes within. It carries the energy of a quest, a creative impulse seeking form. A longing that becomes movement. A question that becomes art. A dream that begins looking for its body.

The conversation drifted into mythology, queerness, and the act of decolonizing spiritual traditions. Rather than accepting inherited stories at face value, we were invited to engage them as living teachings. To honor lineage while remaining curious. To look beyond rigid binaries and remember the fluid, spectrumed nature of life itself. The moon seemed to whisper that wisdom is not preserved through repetition alone. It is preserved through relationship. Through interpretation. Through continuing the conversation.

Another thread emerged:

Despite the violence, uncertainty, and upheaval of our times, we are living amidst extraordinary abundance.

Never before have so many healing traditions, ancestral teachings, creative practices, and spiritual lineages been so accessible. Through globalization, technology, and now artificial intelligence, humanity finds itself holding an unprecedented treasury of knowledge. The challenge is not scarcity. The challenge is discernment. How do we engage abundance without becoming overwhelmed by it? How do we choose depth over endless consumption?

This is where Saturn enters the story.

Jupiter says yes.

Saturn asks: To what, exactly?

Jupiter expands.

Saturn edits.

Jupiter imagines the entire garden.

Saturn decides what actually gets planted this season.

As the circle drew toward its close, the forecast became increasingly luminous. The weeks ahead carry powerful support for writers, artists, teachers, visionaries, storytellers, and creatives of all kinds. The Saraswati Yoga forming later this month speaks of eloquence, inspiration, learning, beauty, and the flowering of creative intelligence. The invitation is not merely to consume beauty, but to participate in it. To write. To paint. To sing. To teach. To imagine.

And so the moon leaves us with a paradox:

Rest deeply.

Create boldly.

Complete what is ending.

Follow what is calling.

Trust the abundance, but keep it focused.

Let the antelope lead you toward the next horizon.

This moon is not asking us to chase harder.

It is asking us to listen more carefully for what is already seeking us.

May you enter the solstice portal with spaciousness.

May you remember that you are part of nature, not separate from it.

And may the intelligence, creativity, beauty, and grace of Saraswati find a home in everything you create this season.

An Invitation:

Mrigashira, the antelope of this New Moon, is the seeker. The one who follows a scent through the forest toward something just beyond sight.

If you find yourself searching, questioning, or sensing that life is calling you toward a new horizon, an astrology reading can help you understand the deeper story unfolding beneath the surface. Together we’ll explore the cycles, patterns, and possibilities present in your chart, not to predict your future, but to help you listen more carefully to what is already emerging.

Sometimes the next step becomes clear when we stop chasing and begin paying attention.

Astrology Readings with Yoli

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What you’re reading here is a poetic transcription and synthesis of a recent Full Moon sermon, shaped to be received slowly and entered from wherever you are. Paid subscribers have access to the complete video recording of this circle, where the pacing, pauses, and embodied guidance of the live transmission can be felt more fully. Whether you’re reading or listening, you’re invited to engage this offering in a way that supports your own rhythm and attention.

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As May draws to a close and the days stretch toward the summer solstice, this Full Moon arrives not as a grand spectacle, but as a quiet invitation.

While some called this a “Blue Moon,” the deeper story was not about rarity or celestial hype. It was about relationship. About listening closely enough to hear what is trying to emerge from beneath the surface of our lives.

This Full Moon takes place in sidereal Scorpio, in the nakshatra of Anuradha, the lunar mansion symbolized by the lotus flower. The lotus is often mistaken as a symbol of purity because of its beauty. Yet the lotus is sacred for another reason. It does not avoid the mud. It grows through it.

That became the central teaching of the evening.

We gathered at a moment when the collective seems eager to rush forward. Summer is approaching. The days are longer. Life is calling us outdoors. There is movement in the air and a feeling that momentum is building. Yet this moon asks us to resist the pressure of acceleration and instead cultivate discernment.

The astrology itself reflects this tension. Mars, ruler of Scorpio, is strong and fiery in Aries, eager to act, initiate, and solve problems. Meanwhile, the Moon in Scorpio invites us into emotional depth, reflection, and transformation. Together they create a friction that many of us may already be feeling: the pull between doing and feeling, between action and understanding.

The invitation is not to choose one over the other.

The invitation is to slow down enough that action can arise from wisdom rather than reactivity.

Anuradha offers a particularly beautiful medicine for this moment. Ruled by the deity Mitra, guardian of friendship, alliance, and sacred relationship, this nakshatra reminds us that transformation is not meant to happen in isolation. Even within the depths of Scorpio’s underworld terrain, companionship remains essential.

Who walks beside you when life becomes difficult?

What relationships help you remember who you are?

What communities restore your sense of belonging?

Again and again, the circle returned to the understanding that healing is relational. We are not asked to descend into the underworld alone. We are asked to maintain the thread.

The thread between self and body.

The thread between ancestor and descendant.

The thread between grief and love.

The thread between imagination and responsibility.

The thread between who we have been and who we are becoming.

Throughout the evening, devotion emerged as a central theme. Not devotion as obedience. Not devotion as self-sacrifice. But devotion as sustained relationship with what truly matters.

A garden.

A friendship.

A spiritual practice.

A movement.

A body.

A piece of land.

A dream.

The Full Moon asks us to examine where our life force is currently invested. What has earned our devotion? What continues to nourish us? And perhaps more importantly, what has been receiving our devotion without reciprocation?

Many of us have become devoted to urgency.

Devoted to perfectionism.

Devoted to anxiety.

Devoted to over-giving.

Devoted to proving our worth.

This moon shines a light on those hidden agreements and asks whether they still deserve our energy.

The shadow side of Anuradha reveals itself wherever suffering has been mistaken for devotion. Wherever belonging has required self-abandonment. Wherever fear of letting go has disguised itself as loyalty.

The question beneath the question is simple:

Is this truly devotion?

Or am I afraid to release what has already ended?

Like the lotus rooted in the mud, we are invited to trust a slower process. The lotus does not rush toward the sun. It unfolds gradually. It rises through darkness, through water, through the complexity of emotional life, reaching toward light one patient movement at a time.

Trust is built slowly.

Healing happens slowly.

Movements grow slowly.

Love deepens slowly.

The lotus knows this.

As the circle drew toward completion, we were left with an image that felt particularly fitting for this moon. Not a hero carrying a torch into the darkness. Not a warrior conquering the underworld.

Instead, someone descending with a tether tied gently around their waist.

A thread connecting them to what matters most.

A reminder that even in periods of grief, uncertainty, transformation, or release, we are never entirely separate from the relationships that sustain us.

This Full Moon asks us to feel deeply.

To release what is outdated.

To renew the agreements that still carry life.

To nurture whatever is trying to bloom through the mud of our current circumstances.

And above all, to remember that courage is not the absence of vulnerability.

Courage is remaining devoted to love while moving through change.

Continue the Journey

The Moon offers collective wisdom. Your birth chart reveals how that wisdom is living within you.

If this reflection resonated, an astrology reading can help you understand where the themes of devotion, release, belonging, and transformation are unfolding in your own life. Together we’ll explore the cycles, gifts, and invitations present in your chart so you can move through this season with greater clarity and trust.

Astrology Readings with Yoli

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What you’re reading here is a poetic transcription and synthesis of a recent New Moon sermon, shaped to be received slowly and entered from wherever you are. Paid subscribers have access to the complete video recording of this circle, where the pacing, pauses, and embodied guidance of the live transmission can be felt more fully. Whether you’re reading or listening, you’re invited to engage this offering in a way that supports your own rhythm and attention.

Subscribe now

There is a sweetness moving through this New Moon in Taurus, but it is not the sweetness of escape. It is the sweetness that arrives after the rain finally breaks the dust from the air. The sweetness of bees returning to their labor. The sweetness of green appearing where the land once looked barren. From the gardens outside Marrakech to the distant High Atlas Mountains washed clean by impossible spring rains, this moon opened as an embodied remembering that life wants to regenerate itself.

The circle unfolded like sitting together on a rooftop after a storm, watching the world breathe again. Butterflies busy with their small sacred assignments. Cats roaming in heat. Flowers insisting on beauty without apology. The feeling that perhaps, for a brief moment between May and June, we are being offered a softer threshold before the next great turning begins.

This New Moon carries the resonance of Saturn. Shani Amavasya. Saturn’s own holy day and birthday woven into the dark moon itself. Yet rather than approaching Saturn as punishment, the invitation here was toward maturation as a form of devotion. The slow simmer of becoming. The kind of transformation that happens the way good food cooks: low heat, patience, flavor entering every fiber. Saturn was not framed as deprivation, but as the sacred architecture that allows beauty to endure. Responsibility not as burden, but as refinement.

And beneath it all was the sensation that we are standing in-between worlds.

The Sun and Moon had only just crossed from Aries into Taurus, still suspended in the liminal waters of gandanta, not fully settled, not fully arrived. A threshold moon. A crossing moon. One where the nervous system can feel both the instability of transition and the excitement of emergence.

Waiting at the doorway was Uranus, the wild guest at the cosmic gathering. The force of sudden insight, rupture, liberation, and unexpected change. The kind of energy that cracks open structures so something more alive can enter. Throughout the circle there was a palpable awareness that collective reality itself is unstable right now. Timelines moving fast. Systems shaking. People overwhelmed by the velocity of change.

Yet the deeper teaching of the night was not fear.

It was discernment.

Again and again, the invitation returned to source connection. To uplink. To stop drinking from the poisoned well of endless media consumption and return instead to beauty, prayer, vibration, ancestors, flowers, sound, stillness, breath, devotion. Not as escapism, but as spiritual hygiene. A remembering that benefic forces may feel diminished collectively right now, but human beings are not powerless when rooted in relationality with the sacred.

The conversation then descended into the fierce and ancient fires of Krittika Nakshatra, the lunar mansion holding this New Moon. The Seven Sisters. The Pleiades. The celestial womb of fire and transformation. Kritika arrived not as gentle comfort, but as the surgeon’s blade. A force that cuts away what obstructs life force. A destructive energy, yes, but one in service of purification, evolution, and the restoration of deeper integrity.

The imagery throughout the transmission felt mythic and visceral: Shiva’s fiery seed carried by water, protected in the wombs of the Seven Sisters until it could become Kartikeya, the force capable of defeating the demons overwhelming the world. Fire and water together. Destruction in service of creation. The soul undergoing surgery so that light may circulate again.

And underneath the astrology was a much quieter question humming through the room:

What must now be cut away so that life can move through you more honestly?

What distractions, fantasies, avoidance patterns, overwhelm cycles, or spiritualized fog have become barriers to your own radiance?

Because Saturn is moving toward Revati, the final nakshatra of the zodiac. The field of endings, crossings, dissolution, migration, and spiritual maturation. Not an explosive ending, but a slow distillation. A long exhale at the edge of one era before another begins.

The feeling of the circle was ultimately this:

We are living through a time where illusion is thinning.

And while that can feel disorienting, there is also extraordinary grace available when we choose to remain connected to beauty, rhythm, embodiment, and the intelligence of the soul.

This moon did not ask us to transcend the world.

It asked us to become more fully inside it.

To let the rain touch the dust.
To let the fire refine the heart.
To let the light return through the body.

An Invitation:

This moon cycle carries both sweetness and sharpening. With Saturn entering Revati, Uranus stirring Taurus, and the fires of Kritika active beneath the surface, many of us are feeling the tension between exhaustion and transformation, endings and emergence, overwhelm and clarity.

If you are navigating a threshold season in your life, astrology readings are open. These sessions offer a space to understand the deeper timing and initiations moving through your chart right now: what is being cleared, what is asking to mature, and where life may be trying to guide you next.

Sometimes the chart doesn’t remove uncertainty. It simply helps you walk through change with more consciousness, steadiness, and trust in your own inner rhythm.

Astrology Readings with Yoli

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