Dharma + Karma in Harmony

We are in our own way! I was at the neurologist over 11 years ago complaining of memory issues, brain fog, mood swings and guess what he told me–

You are a bored housewife. I was so very angry at that rude man! Didn’t he know that I had 3 part time jobs?

He brought the sword of truth to a place that needed the pain of Christ to divide up my small ways of thinking patterned in a hostile past. I was repeating my trauma conditioning without being conscious. I get frustrated with myself. And I get frustrated with others but our heavenly Abba is simply never frustrated with us. He will keep dropping hints until we are ready to make the change because we need new energy, new inspiration and purpose to drive the action.

The only way to new neural pathways and a new good life free of self-imposed suffering was daily bravery. Stretching who I thought I was and what I was capable of.

Here I am all these years later and nothing has changed at 58!

I am a lifelong learner evolving and finding ever deepening faith and meaning.

We must all balance the forces of foundational dharma (stability, structure, fundamentals) with the forces of karma (mobility, chaos, change, growth).

Yoga is one powerful daily ritual which brings structure to the inner chaos of the subconscious mind, merging consciousness and unconscious (hidden cosmic) power so that we can be of service in big and small ways.

Jesus brings the sword and we must trust when we hear the words which are meant to challenge and anger the tiny, fragile ego– there’s more of you to BE. Inhale the Ruach of the Living One deep into your belly. Fill your whole body with the breath of new life and exhale deeply, sighing out a loud trumpet sound of stress. Again and again until you are more sure of your abiding in God’s body and heart.

Receive Divine Love and go!!

We are not Lot’s daughters

Hubby and I walked over the bridge today from Jersey to Philly. Bridges have often been portals for me to process. I got to thinking about the bizarro story of Lot’s daughters sleeping with their father in Gen 19. Any time there is a strange scripture that on the surface makes no sense, we can be sure to dive deeper and ask the Holy Spirit to inform us of meaning. Earlier in the day I was contemplating our belly button (see me literally naval-gazing) and it’s connection to our mothers and how once disconnected they are actually scars representing our severing from our earthly parents.

We are children of God.

All of Creation awaits with anticipation for the sons and daughters to be revealed in order to trust the unfolding of the path of Christ’s resurrection life– fueling us and healing us from our traumas. Trauma remained in us as stuck depressive energy for too long– we did not know we could freely grieve and freely express our anger to the Lord, but we are emotionally maturing.

Our father is not of this earthly realm and when we ‘sleep with’ him in cahoots with a powerless parent, we will produce fruit that does not remain. We will see that this father has become our maker and we are bound to the ways of the world– our lusts will drive us, our wounds will cause us to seek success in unhealthy ways and our ties to the lower thoughts of jealousy, comparing, and lack will fill us with despair. We will not see miracles for our children and our grandchildren.

More importantly, We will not see that our Heavenly Father has placed manna all around for our consumption . We will miss that this prana is energy as fuel for our bodies and minds because it is from above– it’s spiritual nourishment in the form of relationship. In the form of remembering who and who’s we are. We will build the door to heaven in any way we see fit for we were created to fight and battle for this union: when we have momentarily forgotten our birthright. We are not fathered by this ‘man’ down here– no, we have an Abba who took on human flesh to win back our souls.

An Abba who did HIS OWN DIRTY WORK in the body of the Son.

One who delights in us and repeats all day every day– You are my sweetie, just My best girl. You hear me? You are mine and I am providing the resurrection life. Lean in. Ask. Seek, then wait on me. Trust the seasons– the living and the dying, yes but this can be in a day or a week or a year. We do not control the chronos time. All we can do is our spiritual disciplines which help us enter the mind body spirit trinity of kairos: where heaven meets earth. “Heaven is here, when the mind is clear” croons MC Yogi.

Abba promises –I will show you that you are cared for and loved. Do not for one moment be anxious. Turn your eyes to Jesus- the one who carries your bricks on his back. And like my friend Jane’s vision from Him, He will hand them to you, to place in the earth as your incarnational career. Yes, your whole job is to simply be you. Be the best most authentic and vulnerable courageous you you can be. You are innocent and you are bold. Be not afraid daughters of our King– love wildly and dance as if all are watching!! They see the life of the Son in you and on you. We are here to display the image of Christ in our lives as we glorify our sweet and sacrificial Father in heaven. Then the whole earth will sing with the assurance that She too is included in the plan. All are included. All get to participate. Arise. I say to you Arise!

Jesus is our Sabbath Rest

Day two of grief: the day after our sweet golden retriever Sierra left us, I’m wont to sit with my Jesus and listen.

Jesus rests me

Jesus lifts me

Jesus is a frequency as am I

This frequency shatters illusion for it is Truth with a capital T

Jesus cannot leave me

Jesus is my rock

and my living well of energy

Free energy- no need to draw upon systems built for this age

His system is built for eternally knowing who I am

I cannot forget for I enjoy secure attachment
Even my grief does not destabilize me

Every wave that hits is another opportunity to reach for his hand

You Are the Firmament

” Man does not know he carries the stars hidden in himself and he is the microcosm and thus carries within him the whole firmament.” Paracelsus, the man who brought chemistry to medicine.

When did I stop believing what others told me about God and begin to experience firsthand? That’s an unanswerable question but I imagine the age of the guru/priest is coming to an end. When did I become the woman who brought yoga to Christians? Lots of people are on a similar East meets West path but in my neck of the woods (Jersey, )my calling has always felt a bit lonely butI’ve come to be a proud unicorn of sorts.

I first met the monk in residence at Community of Peace at the Wild Goose festival in Hot Springs, NC in 2015. It was kismet. With my 15 year old son asleep nearby in our tent, I wandered over to sit on the ground in the front row of an afternoon kirtan. Back at home I’d found kirtan to be one of my most powerful sound healings. During those years, my body still carried enormous unprocessed trauma charge and I was actively seeking relief from unhealthy patterns of thinking and behavior.Chant had become a place of yielding and of unity- one with God, sound, community and nature. On this day, a new ‘charge’ was expressing in my body as the chanter repeated Shakti, Shakti and my wildness began to unfurl.

I let Her.

I agreed, D’accord.

And in Stefan’s own words, “I was now the leader of the band.” See me smiling.

For there was no ‘I’, no self. There was only the invitational energy to be liberated from every social boundary, every cultural norm to behave, and any care for what others might be thinking. I imagine my feminine form morphed into one beautiful expression of shakti that day.

You see, if we get out of love’s way, we become the firmament. We can find ourselves being danced by Reality’s rhythms.Most of the time we are torqued within by unprocessed life experiences. Most of the time our nervous system is in some measure of fight, flight or freeze thanks to powerlessness in our past. Times when reality was just too much and our own energy did not flow freely; no, it had to form a dissonance.

Enter yoga— the ideal method for untorquing energy and creating resonance. It is love who will invite all of our survival mechanisms to unfurl. Only love and grace and mercy have the power to unhinge these protective boxes we’ve stored within.

I arrived at Community of Peace etin search of a weekend retreat without boxes. I desired to be surrounded by shalom, song, scripture and conversation. I found what I was looking for and much more.

I Once Hated the Light

I saw a TikTok the other day where the creator said that as our light in Christ grows, our circle diminishes because the carnally minded despise this Light.

The next day I was talking to a friend and out of my mouth I found myself admitting that I once hated the women who appeared to be so gentle, so innocent, so peaceful. I hated the women in my circles who did nothing ‘to gain’ this power. I hated these perfectly sweet and faithful women because I did not understand how God’s grace works and I was convinced that if I sacrificed enough of my pain to Him that surely He’d allow me into this heavenly life of light.

I only knew and enjoyed darkness as my comfort. Complaint, moodiness, bossiness, powerlessness, gossip- these were my worldly currencies. How one shifts into the Light is as unique as the individual. But in my understanding we all have the capacity to awaken to this higher way of operating. Above the fray so to speak.

This shift will cost you everything, mind you. Friends, maybe even jobs. But you’ll gain your mind back. You’ll have authority over what sticks in your brain. I remember reading that most of us think the same stale thoughts day in and day out. Something like 80% of our thoughts are on a repetitive loop. In order to break free from an addiction to our own stinkin’ thinking, we must create new neural pathways and synapses and in order to do this, we must ‘die’.

Of course this is in line with our following Christ, picking up our cross and agreeing daily to die to what we perceived, what we preferred and what we understood to be reality.

Now I love the Light. I love having spiritual God goggles to see and pray for the world’s carnality, my carnality. I love that it’s all a messy and forged path which includes my complaining self. It’s all included. This Light sees all, loves all and welcomes ALL.

The Wound is the Place the Light Gets In

This is a famous Rumi quote.

I had an experience, a dark night of the Soul last week. I had asked God to heal my sacral chakra imbalance that was showing up as over-emotionality. We need to become open-hearted and emotionally sober and mature humans but then we must pay attention to where there is a lack of equanimity.

Once I put out this intention, everything in my life from marriage to prayer to somatic therapy began to participate in helping me achieve healing. The Sacral chakra is called Svadhistana or return to sweetness, just like Jesus our original innocence restored. The wound is mostly unconscious and hidden from us. We are probably not operating actively from this deep recess. But there were absolutely long seasons of my life where my behavior in my dysregulated nervous system was driven by this hidden pain.

Jung said that this shadow pain is 99% pure gold holding immense energy for us. The shadow is not evil but simply unknown and unfamiliar– think “Jesus is the rock the builders rejected” from Mark 12. And so here is the key– regulate the nervous system and be gifted the consciousness of Christ in order to trust these healings that arrive like thunder and lightening scaring the Bejeezus out of us. It’s all scriptural– every time God showed up, the person was afraid.

I too was afraid and told God to lighten up– maybe you don’t know what you are doing (see me smiling here), maybe you are not the Lord and King I can trust– maybe I KNOW BETTER. But the Divine therapist knows my psyche like his own and we were partnering in this, we, in union were allowing my matter to receive the Light in the darkness of my wound and my wound in her healing released energy which was numinous and frightening to my nervous system.

But within a day I was integrated and told by my acupuncturist that I should be very grateful I handled the embodiment of these energies without too much difficulty. Easy for her to say!

My sweet 16 year old self is awakening to her power, her voice, and her sexuality. I love her and I’m so proud of how resilient and creative she is. She took on a lot of shit that she shouldn’t have had to and I’m helping her use it as fertilizer now for the tomb is empty and the ideal plot for tilling the soil and planting seeds. Time for the sunshine to help them grow.

Making the unconscious conscious is good, hard work.

How to Return, When to Return

The Heart center is the consciousness of love. And also grief.

When we practice this on our yoga mats, we know what it feels like to rest there with God. We are not alone. This becomes an embodied experience of being in Union with our Beloved. The challenge in our daily lives is that we depart. God does not.

We leave for shiny things. We leave for old patterns. We leave and we are lost from ourselves. How long does not matter because with the heart and love and shalom, only Kairos time is of the essence, not chronos.

When life brings us a storm – a fight with our spouse, an argument at work, an unkind word from someone online, news of the death of a loved one, a friend has cancer. We can begin to remain in our hearts and feel all of the emotions that come with reality. We can even build our conscious container so large that when the rage comes for all that is violent in the world, we allow that too. Now saying–

This too

This too…there is no rejection of psychic material. We are big enough to witness. We have returned to God’s heart holding our own tiny one and together we sit and allow love to rest with us. Trusting love is here, not there. Here we find our natural state of quietness. Where once there was a storm now there is the post-storm lullaby. A shush shush shushing by our Great Mother over us.

Did we forget to return? Did we falsely create a further storm upon storm, adding fuel to the fire of our intense emotions? Of course. Of course as humans who forget, we made matters worse with our stubborn need to be heard and right and strong, not yielding.

This too, is ok, because in Kairos time there is only now. Now is when we get quiet again and still. Now is when we breathe softly and once more receive God’s hope for us. For all of us.

Apostle to Christ (like Junia)

For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

We all know

this is the Apostle Paul. But it’s also me.

I remember when the Spirit informed me I was like Paul. Hmmmm. Say what ?

But yes, I sit here tonight and recall a lifetime of being an enigma to myself. So confused by my actions and inactions. So at a loss as to what made me tick, what drove my dark desires, what made me ashamed of how double-minded I was.

Teaching meditation in prison and striking my child all in the same week. Drinking to excess and starting WW3 with my spouse.

How can I be so honest about my dark nature? Christ showed me that it is ‘dead’. At the end of the day, it accumulates not. Only love lives on and is REAL. Grace is my name because I need it to be.

Anita means Grace because I needed a double portion to get to the other side of all this pain driven nature. I am no longer a dead woman walking. I am alive

and it

is the rare moment that the dead nature rears her ugly head.

Come to your yoga mat and see the stark contrast– knowing for certain that your old man Is crucified with Him and that henceforth we should not serve sin. Rom 6:6

#inchrist #lovealone #falseself #selfawaren

Poetry is Food

“When she looks back, that old young owl,

she sees that

her home, her tree

had become ravaged with wolf urine

and twisted with heat .

Curled and gnarled, she is unable to sleep there.

She begins to travel at night

because she cannot sleep in her home.

She doesn’t know what she’s lookin’ for

But she keeps goin’ and goin’.”

From Tracey Lindbergh’s novel ‘Birdie’

Shared in the book “Want” under a section called–

“What to do when a wolf has peed on your home”

I have returned home to a newly healed body after a chiropractic adjustment to my iliocecal valve released an ancient and primal rage from my psoas – the muscle of the Soul. Keep seeking your wholeness dear ones. Keep cleansing the lens though which you see the world. Be bold–

Prison: Home Away from Home

You might be surprised to hear that I met my “soul” in a federal prison. I started teaching meditation at a nearby facility Februrary 2014 and I kept choosing to spend more and more time behind the walls. Why? you ask..well, I am coming to realize that I am my most authentic self there. I pray to be of service as I enter and so I act with clarity of intention. I have no one to impress. There are no ulterior motives. I am not hiding behind a persona. I have no history with these people. I may never see them again after this class is completed and therefore there are no expectations of a future relationship.

I am serving without hopes of anything in return. And yet, I receive everything.

We practice in the present. We sit in stillness; allowing our center to draw forth and shine. It is simple and raw and unaffected.

It is there amongst the concrete and metal bars, I experience incomparable beauty in a place deemed by much of the world as ugly and forgotten. To me, it is the place I feel the most at home away from home.