Below are a series of essays, which are field notes from explorations in trance, energy, dreaming, healing, and imagining new futures. They are fro my longstanding newsletter, which fro which Spaces Between and Inward Vision emerged.
Select ESSAYS from the Archives
Rest is a Portal {part 2}
Rest is a mindset
Rest is a practice
Rest is an act of devotion
Rest is distinct from leisure
Rest is necessary for the repair of the mind, body, and spirit.
Without rest, we cannot heal.
Intuition and Awareness
In a world that largely focuses on productivity and exploitation of labor as the road to success, it is also unsurprising that frequently intuition that relates to other people is something that folks struggle with managing. It can become wrapped up in codependency, sometimes it becomes a way we exploit ourselves for the benefit of others, or we may unintentionally encroach on others’ boundaries. Chief among the reasons for ignoring intuition is that for many the experience is so overwhelming, they simply tune it out completely.
Winter Dreaming
All new things begin in the dark. Night dreams hold keys to the void. This is not exactly the same this as the liminal, the space between realms; we access the liminal in the subconscious, the transition in and out of night dreaming, in the alpha and theta states, daydreaming, and creative practice. Not to argue semantics, but it’s a meaningful distinction because we still hold elements of ego (who and what we believe we are) in the liminal space, and in void states we lose that sense. Which is both frightening and where the magic lies.
Remembering who you are and discovering who you can be
Seeing the broader patterns of your experience as having echoes in other lifetimes, in other dimensions even, is hugely liberating in terms of allowing trauma to transmute and change. It offers another way to contextualize your experience beyond simply the terrible things you may have endured. It opens up a bigger story.
Timeline Hopping
Just as there is no way we can undo the events of the past, our experiences do not actually eliminate parts of our being, only our access to them. The energy kept alive through detachment carries so much power, it draws us in and shines a light on our pain and fears. The tendency to see ourselves as changing in only one ever moving direction fuels this idea that the future is unknown (and sometimes scary) and the past is a time capsule where experiences no longer change.
Dissociation and our personal cycles
How can grief, rage, trauma, hopelessness move and invite other experiences alongside it, without some active intention to bring in something else? Sometimes suffering can feel like a badge of awareness, where cultivating joy becomes an affront to others. As a commentary culture we seem increasing out of balance. On the other side is the spiritual bypassing and avoidance that also promotes disconnection, trying to eliminate or suppress rage in favor of more “healthy” emotions.
Manifesting without Attachment
Another way of putting it is that to avoid our intentions coalescing around hardwired patterns from our past, we need to move towards deeper layers of the unconscious. In the aspects of our core self that predate all that conditioning and experience we find our true potential, all those individual aspects that could manifest into endless variations of future selves. Focusing attention here allows for manifesting to be more about returning to our most innate capacities and purpose, the unique qualities and potential that we cultivate into a more meaningful life that benefits those around us and ourselves.
Breathwork is Trancework is…
This letting go is a gateway into deep realms of knowledge, but our bodies often stiffen against it and our minds become fearful. In psychedelic experience we might describe this as the dissolving of the ego, and in hypnosis the shift into deep trance is often reported as a feeling of “falling” into or through something.
What is Dreaming, Why Dream?
The last few months I’ve been dreaming very vividly, intensely, most nights and resulting in more than a few nights of little rest. As I said, increasing the only way to work with those dreams seems to be during them- I find myself waking up with both a deep understanding of something complex and important for me personally and also unable to describe it beyond some fragments. They are so abstract I can’t really tell the story. Dream references keep appearing in strange synchronicities too, which creates this bridge between night and day dreaming.
Connecting to the Elements through metaphor and symbol
There is much written already about the spiritual symbolism of the Elements. Some the correlations might be water and emotions, earth and grounding, fire and passion/power, and air as quick movement or tangible change. I personally find those associations very helpful when thinking about allowing elements to function as allies in our personal work. I include them in the explorations below.
But I also think that there is more texture and nuance available when we consider the elements metaphorically, they are a guides for ways that energy can move in different situations and circumstances. Because no element is static, it takes many forms and of course there are manifestations that combine more than one element at a time.
Healing Perfectionism
The search for perfection in itself implies that there is a such a thing as perfect. When we say “I’m only human” or “that was human error” we acknowledge that by definition we are imperfect while also suggesting that being human is not enough.
Ambiguous Loss and Collective Grief
Pauline Boss coined the term Ambiguous Loss as the experience of a person who is either physically present but emotionally absent, or physically absent but emotionally present. This was originally conceptualized in relation to those with loved ones who were missing, or caretaking for the terminally or chronically ill, but I feel that it could also be extended to help understand our collective experience now. A frequent dialog recently is that we are not only grieving what we have already lost, but also anticipating loss; it’s like we are moving through a crisis in slow motion, while also feeling as if time is standing still. Someone astutely shared with me week that it feels like “life has ended“ in a way. There is a deeply ambiguous quality to this time of grief that is very heavy and confusing.