God doesn't take 30 years...you do

Friday, September 13
Los Angeles Ca

My birthday week...
It is my birthday this week...It has been quite a year. A year ago at this time I really committed to travelling less and grounding to create a home for me and my son. He was struggling and had dropped out of high school like I had, repeating alot of the self destructive habits I had at his age. I realized I would have to mature and model for him so he could have more stability to grow from. This morning I woke up in gratitude- I felt so lucky - I woke up in my bed that I love in the house I have really hustled for and look out the window at green bamboo and the sunshine in my backyard. My son is living with me now and just saved enough to buy his first car working this summer. It wasn't an easy journey to change the way I had been doing everything, but I wanted to have different results in my life and so I knew I had to change my habits. Anything worth having is worth fighting for. The biggest fight was with my own fears, resistence and ego to let go of the past and the things I had grown comfortable with. Even getting what you want can be a little scary... God gave me the things that I asked for and now I have to put on my big girl panties and keep taking care of the things I love. Hard work, dedication, faith in the mission and GRATITUDE...Happiness can be a choice...i didn't believe that a few years ago...

LET GO OF YOUR STORY! Yom Kippur is this weekend, it is a Jewish holiday, the day of atonement- letting go of the past. Traditionally it is a day of fasting to atone for all the sins of the year before, to ask forgiveness in relationships and with god...i believe that we live our prayers- so instead of fasting this year- i am making the clear decision to let go of the past emotional baggage and moving forward with strength to the future and the life my soul loves. in all our ceremonies and religions, i believe too much emphasis has been on redemption and suffering. we suffer because we don't know how to let go of our wounds and move forward to a better life. i have been in ceremonies where a mother prayed to god for a better life while her child was being neglected right next to her. she was still suffering from her wounding and so she could not let go of her pain and she was repeating the patterns with her own child. it is like we are all a bunch of wounded children walking around the planet lost and confused, blinded by our own troubles and poking each others wounds. to evolve this humanity, we have got to grow up as individuals! make your prayers real. bring the spirit to the flesh. make heaven on earth now. be willing to be happy. god doesn't take 30 years, you do.

Orphan Heart

ORPHAN HEART

when you are lonely
when you are lost
know i am waiting for you
follow the breadcrumbs on the desert floor
find the red door in the wilderness
listen for the cry of the black raven
dig through the diamond sands to find the golden key
in the darkness follow the one bright star and feel the faint rumbling drumbeat 
beneath your feet
look for the bonfire in the distance
we are gathering
your tribe
your family
we have waited for you many lifetimes
let your immortal soul wake up in your mortal body
taste the red wine beyond blood and death
and remember your destiny
my lover, my child, my mother, my friend
we are all ONE

Do you need a guru?

Here's the thing about teachers and gurus- they inspire us. Guru means "one who points to the way"- they embody something you lack or desire. At first, you are like a baby, you need to be under the wing- just as a mother is the whole world to her baby- the mother is the milk and the life- the baby needs the mothers connection but also needs to grow into a self sufficient adult. At some point you should integrate the practices from your teacher enough that you have the teacher and the practice living inside you, then the teacher becomes like a conscious inside you helping you to make your own decisions. A student is not meant to remain a child forever and if the teaching has been successful the student can be weaned to leave the nest and fly on their own. Of course many students are too afraid to take the leap out of the nest to individuate and many teachers hold their students from their own needs and never let them grow into fully independent beings. These are classic dysfunctions based in human development. The long term relationship between a student and teacher should be based on love not need. The student becomes a spiritual adult and continues the relationship only from the enjoyment of love.

fearless love

FEAR OR LOVE? 
love exists on many levels. one of the most basic and necessary forms of love is a love of life. if we were not taught that life is good, if we were taught habits of fear, addiction, abuse and trauma, then it is very difficult to move from fear to love. but is is often the pain in primary relationships being dysfunctional that drive the individual to seek a greater, more universal love. if we do not love life, if we are at odds in ourselves with the purpose of being alive in a world that has so much suffering, then we cannot learn to love ourselves or another. the first kind of love necessary is a love and surrender to life itself and that love being unconditional, for just as we can never control another person, we can never control what life spontaneously hands us. wether we face joy or pain, union or separation, to love is a choice and it takes willpower to choose love again and again.

consumerist love- we spend more time trying to package ourselves to be worthy of love than being interested in learning how to love. we try to make ourselves look the best so that we will be chosen, like a product off a shelf, to be loved before our date expires. this is the classic consumer model of fear. what if we are not chosen? what if we are never deemed truly worthy of being loved? all of our existential loneliness is stirred and becomes fear of abandonment. and so much time is spent in the obsession to attract love that we do not learn to love the other in any selfless kind of way. what is the point of love?

perhaps the story of my life would be very different if i had learned to be more interested in how to love others than hoping to be loved myself. all the loves i have known have been fleeting, ephemeral, like quicksilver. the feeling of truth dances in the palm of my hand hand like water and then vanishes, like the exhale. like the ocean evaporates to the cloud to rain down again in another form. in this one fragile, tiny and trembling body, the temple of such an enormously thirsty soul, will i ever feel loved enough? again, perhaps the answer is to flip the question around. will i ever learn to love enough? the closest thing to unconditional love i have known is with my own son, and this love too was born of a selfishness. after feeling abandoned by my own parents, i wanted to have a baby to create that unbreakable bond- to have something tethering me to this unstable world. 

LOVE- "It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. ... And one fine morning ---- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" - F Scott Fitzgerald