DOITGIRL

Silence isn’t awkward, it’s golden. Don’t fill it, let it be, it’s ok to let the space between you fill and breathe.

This is NOT to dismiss the beautiful souls who write me after my “sad” posts — but I know part of my dharma is to openly discuss shadow, dark side, depression, and bring it into the light. Repression of our emotions and shadow was part of the patriarchy and has lead to so much anger hate and suffering— we don’t have to live that way anymore. Writing about my pain and confusion and wounds for me is as close as I can get to say, a tumor extraction. If I don’t reveal/release it, I get sick, stuck. We pull out the pain and we look at it, it dissolves in the light, we heal. It’s OK to feel all of this. This is polarity, tantra, we can’t have one without the other, light without dark. Remember how our bodies are about 70% or more water- and when water gets stuck, it gets diseased, the stagnancy creates disease? When I hold back, I get stuck, I get diseased. So releasing puts me back in the flow, like a wild river, I push through the dam. Don’t be worried about me, I heal by doing this, thank you for allowing. 

If you are being called to, nagged by, haunted by a dream, you can be sure that it wants to be born into this world and it has chosen you as its vessel. Birth it.

That post about the man and the wine and mother’s day and shadow stirred up a lot of messages which I look forward to getting back to, but I must take the dog for a walk before I head out to gardening, before I go toss myself into the arms of the earth and ask for this stuff to be taken and transformed. I couldn’t fall asleep until late and I was in bed with Dannna Faulds poetry and the rain falling outside and the dog snoring at the foot of the bed and I could feel the deep waves of changes moving over me, like I was on the bottom floor of the ocean just looking at them move over me, move over me the way they turn a piece of sharp edged broken glass into something smoother, something tougher, something durable but loved. I saw what happend with the man and the wine and the depression on mother’s day and felt all these patterns coming togther tightly to be broken, they were suffocating, they had to suffocate me until I couldn’t take it anymore, until I had to finally break free, no matter what. I got overwhelmed when I got back from the ashram. There were emails and calls and talks about me being a Teacher, about what I Might Become, but I am still so much in the work, still so much in the Fight. My path isn’t going to look like some of my silky shiny friends who do yoga festivals with ease, I got chosen with this work for some other reason, and I’m not going to think about it anymore until I heal myself down here on the ground, live minute by minute, day by day, which is how I healed myself in the first place, living in the present moment, finding the portal of present time and climbing into it, finding freedom and paradise, the keys to the kingdom, through that hole in space, that is waiting for all of us. I can’t be worried about who I will be, and if I will succeed or serve, and I can’t keep talking about who I was, living those old ways, either. I’m grateful for this grounding process I can witness I am in, the gardening work, and to be teaching a few yoga classes, and for those of you who listen, and share. The emails I got the day I wrote the men wine mothersday post could have all come from me, some of them made me shake my head in disbelief at the similarities- and compassion. All these women wrote in with these huge overflowing hearts, the kind of hearts that will save this planet. These big loving divine feminine hearts that bleed for the earth. We need those now. I miss my big huge love heart that leaked, I dont want to be so shiva anymore, I want to be a golden river of love where ever I go. I miss my sweetness. It’s the time of the divine feminine, and I want to return home to the great mother’s arms. I miss my altar and the way I could feel her stroke my hair. I’ll start my return home after this storm that has followed me and swirled over my head for months, and finally, like the great storms, the best storms, cleaned me out completely, with no clouds hanging between my vision, no dead ends to keep roaming anymore, no the dead ends have all been detonated- I should know, I tried them all, they were always trap doors back to the beginning. So I’ll start the trek back to myself today, and meet you all on the road. I feel humbled, raw, little, hopeful. All I ever wanted was a little real life that felt like mine. That’s what’s important to me, my family and the people who love me and the earth and its creatures, and I’ll keep them on the map I’m following home, I’ll keep what I love as the direction I’m headed, my north star. Nothing else matters but what I love. I just got a little lost again. We all do, we all lose ourselves to find ourselves again. Cyclical, just like the cycles of the moon, just like the cycles of the earth. I’ll write soon. I do love you, and it feels good to mean what I say. To know, at least that, that I mean that, I mean what I say. What could be more important, I’m beginning to wonder, than congruency, than alignment, than your feelings, words, actions, all in line with each other. That’s where, how, I’ll find my peace.

I have so much to tell you but not a lot of time, I’ve taken up a new gardening job with a friend of mine, it’s good for someone like me an esoteric writer with a vata imbalance, to throw herself into physical labor, to dig her hands into the earth all day, to literally be grounded. Yesterday we mulched on a cliff of green that rambled and rolled until it just fell into miles of sparkling ocean. But other than that things haven’t been that great since I got home from the ashram, the chasm between this work, doitgirl work, and who i am is bigger than ever. I read recently many of us are feeling that way the rift between who we are now and who we deeply know we can be. I’ve been feeling that massive gap, I mean we can hear and read about self love and the divine and we can thnk about it and talk about it but embodying it? I’ve got some serious work to do. On the good days, I am doitgirl, I am connected to the divine and I can see my vision and I can see what the earth needs clearly and I can help, I can be of service. But on the bad days I’m back in the gutter, sad, scared, alienated feeling worthless and hopeless. I became highly aware of my shadow at the ashram, my unconscious patterns, the drama, the conflict, the destruction I create, the behaviors that keep sending me back to the starting line, having lost everything and having to start over. I hadn’t wanted to look at it my whole life, I hadn’t wanted to own those patterns, but I had to see it at the ashram when they manifested all around me, that it was my work, my doing. The biggest way we abuse our power is thinking we don’t have any, and letting it run amuk, unwatched unattended to. When we have a gift and we don’t use it properly, don’t serve with it. But maybe I finally owned my shadow too much after years of ignoring it, I haven’t released it, Ive lived with guilt and shame for it in it the weeks I got home, licking my wounds, apologizing for the wounds I’ve inflicted on others, hanging my head, Im back in my cave, wondering how I’d ever balance all this behavior out, or free myself from what feels like lifetimes of karmic patterns with men, self love, worthiness, other women, money. I had over corrected into my shiva awakening, I wasnt feeling feminine or loving, now I was just feeling tuff and defensive. I have been feeling downright unlikable. Again, Sarah, where is the balance? I had lost myself again, or have, I don’t know. I haven’t been writing because the things I want to say, aren’t blissful, aren’t so empowering. But that’s not how this all started, they were diaries about shadow and what’s been swept under the rug and stuffed into closets. And to free the monsters I had to write about them. And I think for this relationship with doitgirl to keep working I have to be totally honest so I can continue to free myself from these burdens and the only way that has ever worked was through my writing. Because that’s authenticity right, speaking even though your voice shakes. I’m running out of time this morning but I’ll tell you, briefly, I realized I’d been starving my dark side after my awakening, I was too ethereal and divine and not rooted or here or allowing for very much -I wanted to pretend I was never naughty, shadowy. I wasnt admitting to all my dark and unloved and unhealed. I wasnt’ balanced in polarity, I was either or, either dark or light, feminine or masculine. Well the other night I fed it, I went out, which I rarely do, and had too much wine, which I hate to do, and met a man, did adult things with him. It was a wild fun night. But I couldnt leave it at that. I haven’t been with a man in over a year, since I last dated someone. I had kissed a few exes, but nothing new with passion. Time passed and he didnt call, and in my head I made him up to be some amazing, sexy man, some answer to my problems, who could soothe some of my loneliness, the kind of loneliness a man can soothe. My body missed it. And I got excited about it, then… you know how it goes. He still didn’t call. So Sunday friend and I had wine in the late spring sun on Mother’s Day, which I always let myself feel terrible about, that day, it always manages to make me feel so motherless, and so we walked over to see him at his work- and lemme tell you, he had absolutley no interest in that, in seeing me. It hurt like hell, I don’t know exactly what it hurt. My ego, or my soul, the part of me that really didnt need to be repeating this pattern of men who didnt love me and too much wine. It was a hard fall and it hurt. Yesterday was hard, it was hard to get out of bed feeling so rejected but what’s worse it was all too familiar, a pattern from my old rock n roll party girl days, and that’s why it was so hard to rise and remotely shine - I had been there before, too often. Didnt I know better, would I ever? I think you’d call it an epic fail, sauntering in there on liquid courage with all this stored up hope he might some how help the wound, and then being flatly, stone cold rejected. I even thought about sending him a quick email, apologizing just for … I dont know. Existing. Low. Lower than low. I think part of me acted in fear and desperation, because he isn’t “the one, ” and I dnt want a relationship with him, the way he had flatly told me without me asking, but I panicked it might be a whole NOTHER year before I had the feeling of a beautiful man next to me while I slept. Because that part, I liked. But Monday, yesterday, I woke up in early in morning - I hadnt slept, just fended off nightmares- remembering how he had looked at me like I had the plague, and I was bloated and tired with a terrible bang-chop I had given myself the day before in the bathroom mirror, that whole maybe if I change how I look I’ll change how I feel or who I am move, just like how I dreamed of running away to Maine last weekend, the start your life over in a new place move that never works either. Because whereever you go… you know the rest. I recongized myself even less yesterday mornign than I have in years, and I wondered “Am I beautiful or am I actually totally heinous? Am I brilliant or actually insane? Lovable or… how he looked at me?” All of them, I guessed. That’s how I felt. And none of this was about him, it never is. It’s about me, it’s never about them. It’s all between you and you. And so maybe the me and me isn’t great right now. No this relationship needs more work than ever. I’ve been negative and low, deeply unhappy and unfulfilled again. The merry go round that doesnt let off, the hamster wheel, Groundhog’s Day. What will change? I don’t know. But something needs to, but I know that nothing changes until you do. So I hope I can, in the ways I need to, and I hope those ways become apparent. And then I remembered he really didnt know me, and those who do know me, well, they love me. I remembered once driving down the road and feeling this message, “to know you is to love you. And those who don’t love you, well they don’t know you.” It was a deep mothering voice, I wish I had thought to remember it in my despair yesterday. “To know you is to love you, and those who don’t love you, well they don’t know you.”

Jai Ma. All my Mothers are buried in the Earth now, (as well as in the sky and in me) and so when I devote to the earth, I devote to them as well. To My Mother, my Grandmothers, Durga Ma and Kali Ma and the Great Mother Earth Herself — Jai Ma.

The Universe - her karma and her boomerang effect- works the same way most mothers do: “You make a mess, you clean it up.”

The other day a friend was mad at another woman, and she clutched her stomach like she was sick. “Why do I feel so awful?” She asked. “Because you are in conflict,” I said. Whenever we are not at peace, we are in conflict, we have chosen against someone or something. Between us and another, us and ourselves, us and two lives, the old and the new, or the very feeling of being IN conflict, puts us at disease. Love and peace are our natural states, in them, we are at ease. Conflict is unnatural and puts us at dis-ease. Because deeply, we are all love, all one, and we just want to be loved and forgiven, seen and accepted, and everyone else does too. You dont want to be at war. You want to be at peace. This is your natural state. We are love, they are love, all is one, so being at external war means being at internal war. Release your conflicts. Everyday and often, the practice of finding the pause. In it, the practice of self-forgiveness. 

Ho’oponopono. Forgive yourself. Say to yourself, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.” Let it go. Offer it up.

Then forgiveness of others. Stop and forgive them. Let it go. See all in peace health love and healed for the highest good of all.

Ho’oponopono. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.”

Freedom for self and freedom for all. 

Forgiveness is liberation.

Ho’oponopono.

“I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.”

When asked this about my fearlessness (of which I am not feeling today, but yes, many days) I sometimes offer this quote by way of explanation. “I have had the privilege of losing everything.” - Byron Katie. Or, the proverb: “My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.” And before I get the people who cry “victim blame,” or tell me that I’m not starving in Africa, I say yes, I was not born in genocide or a war torn country or with only one limb. But I have lost everything that at one point thought mattered to me, and I was sure my world was over. And it was, as far as I knew it. I have lost my love, my dignity, my health, my career, my mother and many family whom I loved. This is not about story, because my story is your story. Beneath all the details, our human experience is a shared one. I have lost it all. And so have many of you. And I rose again. And so will you. So are you- in the process of rising. Don’t stop moving toward the light. Don’t forget resistance makes you stronger. Don’t forget the angels and the ancestors have your back. Don’t forget, when no one seems to be agreeing with you or loving you down on this plane, that it’s all between you and God/the Goddess/Your Highest Self. They are watching. You, most importantly, are watching. You’re at a cross roads. Choose forward. Pick yourself up and carry yourself over the threshold into your new life. Choose this life, choose this now, choose to keep moving toward what you love. You belong to each other, you and your dream, you will find each other. I heard something once like, beware of survivors, they fear very little: they have lost it all and learned to live again. But this time, they are stronger, with much less fear, way more love, and that much more clarity.

Was listening to Carolyn Myss talk about the Sage archetype, and she was saying, how when you have The Sight, when you can do Readings, when you have strong Intuition, well that’s a power. And you can’t abuse it. You can’t read a situation and then do nothing about it, you can’t pick or choose when you wanna use it and for whom and definitely not for only your own good. No you can’t read a situation or someone’s feelings - see a broken heart, a fear, an insecurity- and then use it to your own advantage. No you you have to choose compassion everytime. You have to choose honor and humility. You have to choose the highest. You have to go the high road, every time. With great power, comes great responsibility.

“I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don’t say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.” 
― Anaïs Nin