I should TOTALLY be asleep right now because I have to wake up at 6am to go off-site to a Puja, but my heart is so full and the muses are screaming at me, so alas, I am up at 2am writing this blog post to hopefully dump some of the amazingness that has happened on night one of the retreat, so I can get a few hours sleep before another full day of Grace and Magick tomorrow.
I am so in awe of how cyclical everything is showing itself to be this retreat with Amma. 10 years ago I went to a retreat in the mountains of Santa Barbara that featured a Puja that was done by Ma Devi, one of Amma's right-hand people. She did a Kali Puja for the retreatants, and at 4am, we all gathered in the dark of an oak grove and she burned away any Karma we had standing in the way of our true path in life. Kali cuts whatever isn't for your soul's greatest good right out of your life with her knives, and boy did she not waste a minute on me....
2 days later, the advertising agency I worked at closed its doors, and I decided to go back to school and become a Massage Therapist, which began my journey of building The Healing Woods as a bright hope that I had to leave the soul-eating advertising world to do something that served people and allowed me to heal myself in the process.
Ten years later as I arrive at the retreat tonight, I come upon a sign saying that tomorrow morning the very same Ma Devi will be doing another Puja, and this time it is with Lakshmi who is the Goddess of Abundance, Love and Freedom.
These are my 3 core values...so I said yes to The Universe and signed up for the Puja tomorrow. A Puja is a ritual using milk, oils and fire to offer to a certain god or goddess, bring in what you need for your life (or lose, in my case a decade ago)...it also puts energy out into the ether for World Peace.
I always bring a bouquet of roses for Amma the first night I see her each year, and as I was saying my mantra to myself, I looked down at the roses I picked up for her, and realized that they had a sticker on them that literally said one of my core values on it: Freedom.
As I saw this word, "Freedom" I remembered my wolf guide Freedom at Shadowland Foundation who helped me so beautifully on my Cancer journey and sent him a prayer.
I then remembered that the last time I saw Amma, I was still healing from my surgery and was just starting to see my Phoenix wings take shape as I dusted myself off from the ashes of Cancer and the beginnings of huge weight loss.
I also realized that Freedom is what I have been experiencing in so many ways since I finally decided to get real with myself about my health, life, and heart.
I took me completely falling to the floor in 2018 to take my focus off of life, others, and my pain and put it back on myself.
The first step was completely transforming my mind and thoughts to bring in healing and strength through the Cancer Journey.
Once I had Freedom from Cancer, it was time to have Freedom from my past anger, hurt and fear from childhood. I literally spent a full 6 months picking up my Inner Little Girl from the ground and holding her within Hypnosis to let her know that she now has Freedom from the pain she stuffed down with food and that she was strong and beautiful and able to fly free with me on my second Phoenix journey after the fire.
When she was on board for the ride, I then had to give myself Freedom from the weight that tied me down in pain and held me back on what I could do and how long I could do it. I started slowly in the beginning, but each month I lost more and more weight, and the more weight I lost, the more freedom I gained. Freedom of movement being the biggest...and today I can walk faster, longer, climb higher mountains and it is only going to get better and better from here as I get stronger and stronger.
I am still not 100% free...there is one last horizon to claim my Freedom in and it is LOVE.
For so long, I was shut down. First because of a horrible break up that literally tore my heart in 2. Then because I kept attracting the same lesson in different men, and wanted to take a break out of emotional exhaustion. Then I had a lot of pain and health issues from Cancer...then the surgery....then it was time to release and transform mentally in order to lose weight.
Now it is time to release and transform emotionally, and this month is 100% hitting me RIGHT in the heart in the rawest most emotional and vibrant ways.
Journeying with my Desert Shaman blew my heart wide open and showed me how close I am to that full transformation I set an intention for at the beginning of the year...but I was reminded that when I asked for 2019 to be my Year of Metamorphasis, it does not just mean body (weight loss) and mind (Hypnotherapy)...the heart and emotions are in there too, and those, too need to be transformed.
So here I am...beautifully raw from the desert...raw from my heart being used in ways it hasn't been used in a long time with a certain someone...raw from receiving EMDR Therapy to fix the shit my heart went through in the past...raw from seeing the signs and magic all around me here with Amma...and ready to set forth on an even deeper journey with her within the Puja for Love, Freedom and Abundance.
I look back on the 33 year old girl that showed up to the Puja in the Santa Barbara Mountains 10 years ago. She was so unsure of herself, yet lead a band by night and lead a team of salespeople by day. She had big dreams of leaving the corporate world and band behind and running away to India in an Ashram to feel the peace she felt with Amma all the time and not just once a year in between the sheer hell she was in within life.
What she didn't know is that the peace she felt with Amma was just a foreshadowing of the peace she would create in her day to day life in the future, and I am here to thank her for sticking it out, and allowing me to build her dream for her within the life I live today.
The final frontier is love, and I know that future me will thank now me for the work I am doing and pushing through the rawness and pain because I do know I deserve love, even though I've been broken.
I deserve love even more BECAUSE I've been broken.
We are never truly broken...we all break...that is part of living life, but after we are broken we get to heal, and the sooner we own that we are healing more than we own that we are broken, the sooner the pain will stop and the peace will come in to sooth the fire like a soft ocean wave caressing the surface of a volcano before the whole force of the ocean floods in to put out the flames.
My time in the ocean is here...thankfully I'm a wonderful swimmer.
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