These are a few new songs I’ve just added from a recent local house concert. It’s challenging putting live material out for public consumption because there is no chance to clean up warts and blemishes. One take, that’s it, no editing. That’s also the beauty of live performance. It has a raw, immediate quality quite powerful to experience. Such an energy can be generated during a performance that little fumbles and mistakes on the guitar are far less noticeable, even unimportant (depending on your level of trained musicianship and ear sensitivity!).

Still, recordings of a live performance are a whole ‘nother colour of horse! You will hear fumbles here and there, but do try to de-emphasize those and focus on voice, melody and lyrics. That’s my particular strength; the guitar is there to provide background interest and hopefully not intrude too much.

Drown:

This song is from a dream in which a woman with long straight flame-red hair was dancing under a roofed shelter with no walls in a house downpour, twirling and sending her hair out like sheets of flame. As she danced, she sang this song to me. I introduce it as a ‘lesbian love song’.

Beauty is Free

This song is fairly recent; it grew from a moment of feeling utterly transported and knocked-out by the intense, overwhelming beauty I saw in everything around me. No drugs were involved.

Everything is True

This song is my answer to the hype about global warming. The song is saying, in essence, that Mama Earth knows exactly what she’s doing. We’re a part of it, we’re doing her work, even if we don’t understand it or what greater good might come from whatever collective part we play in the environmental changes happening now. Still, the song is not expressing endorsement of abuse. “Mama’s got a big lap, room for all her babies / She says we’re allowed to do pretty much as we please / But that don’t mean we get to do anything we want to..” It’s about finding the balance and acting according to our own sense of integrity.

Red Hands

When I first hear that Afghanistan was being bombed, I was utterly horrified and stricken. I could not believe that this poverty-stricken little country could be pounded on by the bombs of the world. For what? Because a terrorist was hiding there somewhere? Why couldn’t they send in an elite team of assassins? Nothing about it made sense to me; it felt to me like an act of pure, gratuitous, insanity. Yet I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that I was somehow involved, that those were my hands dropping the bombs. As a human, I am responsible for what humans do. This song speaks to that sense of responsibility. It’s a protest and a prayer at the same time. The ‘evil’ in the song refers not to the act of violence, but to the self-righteous justification and finger-pointing. “Evil walks the planet in our flesh / we point at others, whisper, “Wickedness! / They are the ones who must be shown that our God’s the one to dread…”

The Way to Say Goodbye

I wrote this one lo, these many years ago when a man I believed at the time to be the love of my life returned at last… with his fiance. They got married and I was invited to the wedding. It was a truly mythic experience! So of course I went home and wrote this song. It was about working through the processes of shock and betrayal and coming to a state of acceptance and release, letting go with love still intact. “I can love you like the eagle loves the sky / and that’s the way I say goodbye”

The Will to Live

This one is so recent that I’m not certain what it means specifically; it takes a while for me to really grok where the specific images in a song come from, what it means. It has to grow in me. But basically, this one comes from a very intense feeling that sweeps over me sometimes, a visceral, existential hunger to exist, to experience, to lust and live fully. It feels very good to sing! “I’m waiting for that antler-headed man / He goes by many names, I’ll call him Pan / Pan is my man…”

Fool’s Gold

This one is lighter on the surface, but has depth when you look more closely. I wrote it as a children’s song, in the sense that we are all children. There’s a bit of a twist at the end, it goes to an unexpected conclusion. It’s about goals, materialism and being careful about what we wish for. “Fool’s gold glitters in the light of day / Fool’s gold fades in the night away / Fool’s gold is nothing but a pile of leaves in the light of dawn…”

For Waiting

This song is a celebration of, and an exercise in, heart-opening to someone I once felt hatred for. It was written for someone I was in a bad relationship with long ago. After many years I became close friends with him, largely due to his patience and faith that there was something worth salvaging between us. Now, this song helps me keep my heart open while I return the favour. “Thank you for waiting for me / thank you for letting me be …”

If you want to download the songs, you can right-click on the links in the title and choose ’save as’. But you’d probably enjoy a live performance more. House concerts are low stress and easy to arrange; just get together a group of friends for a potluck and invite me. I’ll do the rest. If you’re interested, email me. I will travel if I can get together a string of linked venues and dates. So far I have one in Northern California!

I wrote this yesterday, September 20th. It’s taken me awhile to gather the courage to post it publicly.

—————-

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of my identity as a mother. Another way to say that is, it is my daughter’s thirtieth birthday. I feel as emotional about this transition as I did when I myself turned thirty, which is to say, plenty. It is the Saturn Return of that time, so now I am compelled to turn back and face my mothering history, to evaluate what has and has not worked and to change what I can to improve the workability of my parenting.

My daughter is a private sort of person who doesn’t appreciate being written about, and I am a writer. I write about myself and my life, which includes my children and my family. I have so far focused mostly on my own internal poetic and philosophical processes because of my uncertain boundaries around telling stories that reveal personal things about people I love. According to “The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear,” the agreed-upon ethics are fuzzy in this area. Different writers make different choices about what to write about where their families are concerned, and it is always difficult, challenging and potentially traumatic.

Obviously memoirists can be ruthless when it comes to divulging their families’ stories, but I don’t personally wish to share publicly any details or story that might cause my children to feel their privacy has been violated. At the same time, I am compelled as a chronicler of crazy truth to bespeak my discoveries and to track my experiences for the benefit of the collective brain.

It seems I find myself in the role of one who speaks publicly, a rather heavily populated niche these days. It is true that I am only one of many, but I speak from my own singular viewpoint, and in case my theory of bloggers expressing the collective thought processes of Earth (and thus facilitating human social evolution) should prove correct, I dare not suppress myself.

So. On this thirtieth anniversary of my first birthing, I am experiencing a personal epiphany around parenting. This essay explores some of what it meant to me to be a parent in times of internal and external chaos and change, and perhaps offers some excuses to get me off the hook that I currently dangle from in my own twisted mind. I write to untangle my own confusions as much as for any other reason. I share my writings because I can—it is technologically possible and I have the tools—and because of various astrological factors (Leo Moon touching Pluto, Gemini Mars on the Midheaven also touching Pluto) which translate to mean that I am compelled, nothing I can do about it. All I can do is wake up and hopefully shift from spilling my guts to sharing my experience and perception in a balanced way. I am doing my best, but between compulsion and confusion, discrimination is a challenge. If I mess up, let me know, I will try to do better. I am all about doing better.

What follows explores feelings that I am still not comfortable with, and it reads awkwardly, but it’s a start, an opening. Warts and all. Bleah.

I first became a Mom at age twenty, a time when I was incapable of love or much consciousness. This is not a self-criticism, merely an observation, and it’s not a hidden poke at young people, as though youth is incapable of those things. This is about me and how I was, and I don’t believe my journey to be typical or representative of others. My children, for example, were more sensitive and aware, emotionally and intellectually, at ten than I was at twenty.

There were at least two of me in the early days: one was a marionette with feelings and reactions. I thought about things, but I was not aware that I was thinking or what I was thinking about. “I lived in a dream, a nightmare, it seemed.” My actions were reactions, programmed responses, not considered choices. This was a shocked-out self, a damaged child who, having been re-traumatized at regular intervals, had frozen into a trauma state, unable to process new information, as if the moment of trauma had never passed.

The other part seemed wise, magical, a pair of knowing, loving eyes that looked through mine and gazed upon life with compassion and truth. I did not personally feel that love, but it was there, separated from the rest of me by a veil of fog. This part could see me and through me she saw others, but I could not feel what she felt except dimly.

She came into me, met and merged with me so that I became one whole being, alive and capable of loving, when my daughter was born. In her wide infant eyes, I saw a reflection of myself, the all-loving, all-knowing Mother. I felt her inside me, I felt my heart open like a flower for the first time. I had no words to describe this experience then, only that this little person who had emerged from my very own body was the most precious, perfect, wonderful creature ever.

Oh, did I fall for that baby. I fell so hard, I was smitten practically back into unconsciousness. I wanted her never to experience a moment of hurt, trauma or deprivation in her life. I wanted her to have everything I had never had, every opportunity, every protection, every hope, every possible dream come true. I felt for her, in other words, as most any mother feels toward her new baby. I’m not claiming that there was something special or unusual about my love for my child; in fact, it’s entirely likely my own mother felt and feels the same things for me, her first baby.

What was striking was the difference that love made in me. I count the beginning of my spiritual growth from that moment they lay her on my breast, fresh from my womb, and I first met my daughter’s eyes. I changed. I became a human with the capacity for love.

The marionette who still made up half of my self continued to act as programmed, though. When my baby girl was a month old, I returned to my office job as I had previously agreed to do in response to my husband’s urging and my own nascent ambitious promptings. I vaguely enjoyed the idea of having a career and being independent in the world, and I knew we needed the money. At the time I did it, though, it wasn’t right for me or my child. It was far soon to return to work. She was too young, and I wasn’t able to handle the stress. Our premature separation tore the fabric of the bond between myself and my baby.

For the first few weeks, I gave her a bottle of formula for the middle of the day while I was gone and nursed the rest of the time. She was a quiet child who rarely cried, but once I went back to work, she howled constantly. My mother-in-law insisted that it was because my milk was ‘bad,’ so I weaned her from the breast. It didn’t occur to me that the real problem might be that she couldn’t handle the formula bottle, or even that she missed me, was frightened and traumatized. Even when her crying continued unabated after she was weaned, I didn’t clue in. I was overloaded, juggling a stressful full-time job full of intrigue and office politics with an unhappy new baby, and I had no focus or awareness to spare.

Still, deep down I knew it was wrong to be leaving my baby, wrong to stop nursing when I did, and I worried constantly. This doesn’t mean I believe all working mothers are wrong; other mothers and babies make their own choices. If childcare is high-quality and caring, and if Mom knows what she’s doing, then returning to work can be a perfectly viable choice. However, that was not the case with me. I didn’t want to work, I wanted to stay at home and bathe in milky bliss with my beautiful new baby, and the childcare we were able to find was far from high quality. In fact, I was horrified to learn that my precious girl was being left in a darkened room all day with the radio on, so we pulled her from that place and the stress of trying to find substitute adequate childcare was added to the other stresses.

I stayed on the job for three months, finally leaving that job only after collapsing in tears in the boss’s office. I caved in under the pressure and found myself quitting without planning to in order to be at home with my child. I tried a month of working midnight shift at another job, but that proved impossible, since the baby was not a daytime napper. After a month of nearly no sleep and several near-accidents drifting off the road while driving home from work during morning rush hour, I quit for good.

Things were never the same between us after that. The ease and comfort, the bliss was gone. I had needed the bonding time to last longer, and so did she. She had been left in the hands of uncaring others and our mother-child relationship suffered the consequences.

I learned better, and my sons benefited. However, it was clear from an early age that my daughter was angry with me, and all her life, she has found new reasons to be angry, to blame me, to push me away. And I was guilty beyond bearing. It has been agonizing.

So what’s the epiphany? Simply that now I understand that despite the fact that I did it, there is nothing I can do about it now. I can’t fix her infancy, and I can’t fix our relationship. All I can do is be here for her when she reaches for me. And I will.

One thing has not changed. I am still in love with that girl. She is my perfect, precious one-and-only firstborn, the one who taught me what love really feels like. I had other children and each of them opened me wider, but only one can be first. I firmly believe her to be supernaturally gifted, intelligent and gorgeous beyond belief, and I defy anyone to contradict me. I love that child. I love that woman. But bottom line, I won’t impose myself on her or push my unwelcome love into her world anymore. It’s here, though. I’m here.

Happy birthday, firstborn. I love you. Welcome to your thirties. They’re not so bad, once you get used to them. May they be better for you than they were for me; I want everything about your life to be better than mine was for me. Not because mine has been so terrible—since adulthood, my life has steadily improved, actually—but because that’s what parents want for our children.

by phee

As if we needed another that Merrica is a fascist state. I got this from an English-teacher friend’s private blog:

Every single kid in my class of 30 had been aggressively pursued by the military. Every single one of them. Several months of daily phone calls–some more than once a day. They talked about how the recruiters had followed kids around in high school, zeroing in on the insecure or unhappy-looking ones. How they came and hung out in the library on campus even though we’ve barred them.

Apparently every high school in the country must allow recruiters in or lose federal funding–just one of the many wonders of the “No Child’s Behind Left” program.

What can be said to that? As a Canadian, I am beyond stunned. I can’t imagine, though it makes me wonder, is the Canadian military doing this kind of thing now too? What with its freshly-coined copycat rhetoric about ‘heroes sacrificing themselves for a just cause’ that they are spouting–even, God be gobsmacked, our venerable peacenik CBC Radio people, anything seems possible. I am hearing a distinct faux-patriotic tone in much of what is spouted over the Canadian airwaves these days.

So Merrica is a fascist state, and Kanaduh is panting like an eager puppy fetching sticks for its master. What are we doing? And what can we, the peephole, do? I look around me at the avenues recommended–protest marches, letters to the editor, to our MP, all of that–and none of it looks productive. Protests are ignored by the powers that be, as are protest letters in the print media and to politicians. Where are the effective avenues for change in the modern age?

Right now, the online Information Age is exploding. How that will change the face of life on earth is yet to be seen, but that it is changing is apparent. The flood of individual stories, opinions and perspectives on the great issues that concern us today, coming through so many media at once via the blogosphere and various alternative media available online ranging from crackpot to eruditely concerned are connecting the dots of the synaptic system formed by the collective brain cells of individual humans. We are Earth’s thoughts, thinking out loud.

If this is true, as I and many others with certain senses, perceptions and experiential perspectives have come to believe, then the Internet is Earth’s own evolution in action, and these words and the words and experience of my friend and so many others crying foul via the e-thers must eventually have an effect.

There. I’ve talked myself into believing that the act of writing these thoughts is worthwhile, regardless of what my ‘why bother?’ self might want to point out. Each blogger, bored blatherer and bleeding heart is working together to teaching the Big Us that war in all its grisly and subtle forms is simply, intrinsically inimical and repulsive to the human heart. The voice of collective will may well lead to awakening the numb ones who are as yet unaccustomed to or incapable of listening to their hearts.

I foresee a day when more and more people take to the road, unplug from their plugged-in thing-worshiping life-denying lifestyles and go forth to spread the subversive word. May it be so. Perhaps we can change the world.

Come to think of it, in a month or so I will likely be living in my van. Where will I go? What will I do? Well. The future is open, and I hear voices calling. Perhaps it’s time to take my show on the road.

I didn’t write this, and I don’t normally post things here that I haven’t written, but I’ll make an exception. This poem was posted to a discussion list I’m on by its author, and it touched me deeply. It beautifully articulates a feeling that is very familiar indeed, the ways that I, and so many people, shrink ourselves, contract our horizons, all for the sake of not rocking the boat and not frightening or hurting our loved ones. I’ve stopped doing that, terrifying though it has been, and it’s worked out so far!

In celebration of taking risks, jumping off cliffs and chancing change:

For the Sake of Not Hurting the Ones We Love

by Mehera Hathaway

I am pacing
Always pacing
In my gilded cage
You say I am leaving
I say I am going to myself
We agree to disagree
And call it a day
Coffee and kisses at the dawning of the day
Are sweet and welcome
But they do not feed my soul
My spirit wants to dance in the flame of my eternal being
You are not holding me back
You are holding me in kindness
And yet I am not where I want to be
How do I tell you…
You will say “am I not enough?”
And I in turn will say to you…
The world is full of love, and so am I

I want to expand and grow beyond the boundaries of this restless life
I want to touch, taste, hear and feel

“So leave me already”
It always ends the same way
And so tomorrow I will wake to your coffee and sweet kisses
Unsure of what the future holds
Knowing that my leaving
Is the only way to truly come home

Beautiful words received after this most recent concert, or salon (I like that word better) on Saturday night:

“This was a perfect evening or ‘Salon’. Your lyrics are a beautiful expression of complex subjects and emotions that are often difficult to put into words. Thank you for manifesting on my holodeck.”

“Thank you for this magical journey - visiting past and futures still to come and culminating with the present. What a glorious singing being you are — what a glorious singing being you are — ”

“I just want to thank you and let you know how much T and I needed an evening like this. I won’t forget you and know that we’ll cross paths. I feel like I started to breathe again.”

“Thank you for sharing your stories and journeys in your beautiful voice, soft and strong.”

“Thanks so much again for the wonderful soothing concert last night at —’s home!! It was wonderful! I look forward to enjoying your CD for many moons to come.”

I gratefully receive magical songs that fly into my head and sing themselves to me. It has taken many years of process and practice, discovery and recovery of my voice, and the help of many amazing teachers and helpers. This has been a very long apprenticeship; now, I emerge from my chrysalis to offer myself, to fully be what I am. Yes!

My vision is to travel with my guitar and my songs and go where the wind blows, play in peoples’ homes and share my muse and heart, travelling in true troubadour fashion called forth by those who seek what I offer. I need no roots. I am not a homebody. I am subject to a holy wanderlust I have only recently learned to name, and it only grows stronger the longer I live.

The road is calling me. Your couch is calling me. I come to sing for my supper, and I spread the beloved word as I go.

Imagine a circle of friends curled up in your living room, snuggling and journeying to an intimate sharing of songs. I break the paradigms of performer and audience, musician and fans. I seek to become, I am a vessel for the nourishment of hearts and bodies, minds and spirits, and this is my bliss, to give, to live.

The business of music is no business of mine. I am not about business. I am all about playing my part in facilitating the evolution of all personkind, including the great Person which is this living planet and the Person who is the Whole, greater than the sum of the parts of all that is, was, might have been or might become.

Once, I feared to show my face to the world. I shrunk from the light into the shadows, but the shadows were not safe. I am ready now, and I am still shy, still careful. I dare to risk sharing my heart with others that they may more easily open their own hearts with their beloveds and that they may, if they chooose, join my own growing and evolving circle of friends and lovers.

Rather than fans, applause or money, I seek love, new experiences and heartsharing. I am here to offer my gifts to you and to rediscover who you are as we meet again for the first time. I trust my friends, my brothers and sisters and travelers on the walk of life. We are familiars from the beginning of things, and we know. I trust the path which beckons, calls and moves forward under my feet. We are ever-growing souls in an evolving universe; the world is getting smaller because we are kindred spirits growing greater.

I am a sacred vessel, as are we all, and I am here for you now, as we are all here for each other.

The songs should be listened to with the ears and the heart and felt with the body. If you feel called to have me come to your home, email me and we’ll find a way. It doesn’t matter to me so much where you live; I will connect the dots of the places I am called and trace a trajectory around the world if it goes that far. It may take a little longer if you live in Australia, but if you want me I’ll get there somehow.

And I’ll keep writing. Have laptop, will travel. Holy Hallelujah, Batman!

Yes, it is happening now. On the 15th of September, I begin my solo journey as a sacred balladeer, a genre invented by a dear friend for me. If the skin fits–wear it! My concert for the women at PWCA camp this summer was my way of ceremonially stepping-into the role, owning and claiming the name for myself.

(Standing in front of the room. Clearing throat. Ahem. Ahum.) “Hi, everybody. My name is Phoenix and I am a sacred balladeer, a chronicler of crazy truth and a life dancer. I am fifty. I’m old enough now.”

Singing/songwriting is foremost among my passions! For many years now I’ve been the receiver of a large repertoire of magical songs that fly into my head and make me remember them. I am choosing to emerge from my chrysalis to share them with people. Hallelujah!

The songs below are mostly on the general theme of women and my relationship with the feminine principle. I have many other songs in a wide range of themes. To hear more music and see some of the lyrics, go to the band website. There is a CD available with 12 songs on it, 7 of them mine. The CD has versions of “(She Lives) In the Dark of the Moon” and “Cup of Clay”, both of which can be heard below. The following are a selection of songs recorded live at a concert at PWCA Women’s Camp on Lake Cowichan in August of 2007; click on the links to listen.

Obvious
Death to Sacred Cows
Fat Naked Woman
Drown
Cup of Clay
Women Like Me
(She Lives) In the Dark of the Moon
Midnight Flea Circus
Power Song

some of the feedback so far:

“I enjoyed and was impressed with the complexity of your poetry and music, and the challenging subject matter which you address in them.”

“Not only were your songs beautiful and the quality of your voice both tender and strong, but I think your songs are healing songs.”

“Your concert night was really enjoyable, professional and very entertaining. Your stories before all the songs made them special and personal.”

“I loved your concert. I was thrilled and impressed by your courage, your heart-revealing lyrics, your stage presence, the way your voice is opening more and more.”

As this housesit winds to a close in mid-October, I’m considering where to live next. My options remain open: one in particular I especially hope for, though I’ll wait to say more about that. The future remains open to infinite possibilities; I am alternately thrilled and chilled to the bone with primal fear of the unknown.

I expect wondrous things to come of this year, blessed be and amen to that. Yes. Woo hoo. And… that stirs some back-brain activity that might derail me if I don’t address it. I feel an essay coming:

The Secret, the Law of Attraction, Conscious Language all involve changing the shape of thoughts through the exercise of will; in other words, thinking differently in order to harness the power of positive thoughts to create a better reality for ourselves. Considerations of what sort of reality we try to create with these thoughts aside, it’s a very good idea, but like many good ideas, there are problems in practice.

In my experience, darker thoughts often spontaneously rise to contradict conscious intent, and this effectively cancels out positive reality-creation potential. Part of me believes while another part sneers in the background, seeing only the shadow cast by the light.

Example: “I love myself. I’m beautiful,” evokes an immediate, hidden, unconscious response: “What a crock. Nobody else loves me. I’m ugly even if I think I’m beautiful.” I can say positively, “Cancel that thought,” or “I release the judgment that nobody loves me and I’m ugly,” which helps, but until I get at the root causes for these thoughts, changes are merely cosmetic.

Becoming aware of the echoes and unconscious reactions to attempts to change and grow is an enlightening process, though changing the pattern of the thoughts isn’t quite as simple and easy as choosing differently, regardless of what ‘they say’.

In my experience and understanding, such rebellious and reactive thoughts simply can’t be controlled, and when we attempt to exert control, we fan the flames of our internal war which is reflected by the external conflicts plaguing the planet. Peace begins within, and is not attained by pouring oil on troubled waters nor through any form of enforced discipline. This is a consensus reality, and until we achieve true (ie, unforced) inner consensus, the majority will rule: so far, the majority of our being is confined to the subconscious.

These parts of self know something that the conscious mind doesn’t, and yes, they are sullen, rebellious, angry and intractable. Why shouldn’t they be? They know exactly how little we trust them, how unwilling we really are to face them, ask them who they are and what they really want. They know us better than we know them, for the divers in the deep can clearly see the swimmers in the light who circle above them, but the light-centric selves are blind to the denizens of the darkness, not to mention uninterested and judgmental.

When we judge some thoughts to be good and others to be bad, rather than exploring all thoughts from source to consequence, we ignore and effectively deny our power. The negative matters, yes, and we do know its potential for destructiveness; that is why we are so earnestly bent on controlling it. But we have no idea what might happen if we truly embrace our negativity and ask it to teach us what it knows.

Thought experiment:

Positive thought: “I am radiant and creative.” Negative response: “I am so full of shit.”

Ask: who said that?
Answer: somebody who knows your secrets.
Ask: what secrets?
Answer: everything, and I mean everything that you don’t like is within you. There’s no escape from your shadow.

Solution seems obvious: embrace and love what you have not liked. Sounds simple, but it’s not easy to pull off.

We need to humble ourselves in the face of our dark, angry, hurting, frightened, cynical selves, to accept that just maybe they know something we don’t. We have (the conscious ego) sought knowledge for so long, and attempted to teach, train, condition and control our subconscious minds which seem the source of so much unruliness, chaos and anxiety, but never have we slowed our search down and simply asked our wayward feelings, what do you know that I don’t know?

Answer: everything.
Ask: such as?
Answer: the premises of the reality under which you operate are fundamentally flawed. Erase and start over. Now.

We don’t like to hear that answer, nor do we want to believe it. Still, to pretend it is wrong just because it is inconvenient to believe appears insanely self-destructive. According to the view from below where such things can be seen, the very foundations of reality are cracked and rotten. All attempts to heal it have so far taken the form of concealing the rot, not changing anything in any real way. Like painting over rotting floorboards and covering them with a nice carpet, then acting surprised when the floor caves in.

Somewhere in the basement an alarm bell is clanging and all the positive thinking, profound discipline and learning in Creation will not make it stop. Only stopping what we are doing and letting ourselves feel how scared and angry we really are will do that, or at least open space to feel what to do and where to go next.

When we stop, we can feel the movement of the spheres, we can hear ourselves breathing. When we end the constant stream of mental lectures and instructions directed toward our lesser selves, we can begin to hear their point of view.

Listen: your body knows things that your mind does not. The flow of understanding has to start to move in different grooves, through circulating loops of feedback, and the knowledge can’t source from somebody else’s system, not ever. You have to feel your way through the particular weaving winding multidimensional labyrinth that is your own personal path, and nobody can teach you how.

Your body is your guide and guru, and it is only mind’s egotistical pride that insists on resisting the impulses that come from your physical wisdom. Your body is always right, even when it is wrong. Indulging in your compulsions is the only way to understand them, but you have to do it with attention and intention to understand, not throwing up mind’s hands and surrendering in a huff, saying, “Ok, you get your way, wake me when you need me for inevitable damage control.”

Your body needs you to stay awake and alive no matter what, no matter how it looks or feels, and to seek the self-trust that provides the magic ingredient for alchemization of your experience.

You learn by doing; you will know you are there only when you actually are there. You will be healed of addictions when you no longer crave them, but the path of resistance can never take you to that desired end. You will always desire things that your mind judges to be wrong until your mind stops judging and starts seeking to understand the meaning of what happens while it is happening.

Your mind is blind, deaf and dumb, the victim of the numbing barrage from the collective mental freak-out, the rebellious, reactive shouting of the unconscious masses. Stop listening to them, and start listening to your ownself.

When you crave with blind raging desire to stuff yourself with sweetness, oblivion or altered awareness, don’t fight the craving. Give in consciously and stay self-lovingly aware as you indulge. Taste what you eat, notice how you feel while in altered states, breathe into your experience with curiosity and the will to accept and understand. Break habits of thought and control first, and physical habits will follow when they are really ready.

Don’t say grudgingly to yourself, “Alright, but just this once.” Don’t impose conditions. Don’t condescend.

Give in lovingly, compassionately, without superior understanding. Know that you do not know what it means, and accept not knowing. Seek not answers from books, teachers or anyone outside your own body of truth. Ask the Consciousness of the Whole for help and support in your journey. Forgive yourself. Constantly.

Forgive yourself, not for what you do, but for the ways that you judge what you do to be bad, wrong, unhealthy or otherwise unacceptable in your own eyes. Forgive your own conditional love for your sweet self. Forgive your petty criticisms, your assumptions and your arrogance. Accept all of your being, the light and the dark, and listen to all of your thoughts, the positive and the negative. Negative thoughts have a teaching to offer: they let you know that a part of you is unhappy with what you are thinking or doing. This does not mean, cave in blindly to every unhappy voice. It means, give each unhappy voice your loving attention and allow its response to be your own. Own it, in other words, as yourself.

Sample situation: suppose you are at a meditation retreat for the purpose of raising your vibration and becoming a more positive and fulfilled being. You are chanting mantras and doing breath exercises in a group.

You are aware of an unhappy voice in the background of your mind: “This is bullshit. I hate this.”
Query from consciousness: “What do you hate about it?”
“It’s stupid and annoying.”
“What is stupid about it?”
“Nobody asked me how I felt about doing this. I hate sitting still. I hate repeating rote thoughts as formulas.”
“What can I do, seeing as how we’re here and committed to the experience, to make it better for you?”
“Listen to me. Feel me.”

Then, allow yourself to do it. Feel how much you hate what you are doing, without abandoning your awareness of the other parts of yourself which are enjoying and thriving in the experience. It is you thinking these things, after all. These thoughts tell a truth about how you really feel that you have not noticed because you believed that to feel it would interfere with having a good experience. Allow the goodness to continue and embrace the badness at the same time. You can do it. You are a great being with room for many internal contradictions and a wide variety of experience. Do not ignore your sad hurting selves.

If a baby cries at a party, somebody needs to care for it, yet the party can go on. Your unhappy thoughts are your own babies crying. You are responsible to them, and ignoring them has long-term consequences.

Allow your body to shift in small ways, to shiver, to quiver in indignation at imposed stillness. Inasmuch as you feel safe to do so, allow small sounds. Notice everything about how it feels to be doing this, stretch your awareness to its limit. Exercise your loving attention. Let your attention go toward, not stopping or controlling your negativity, but increasing and expanding your awareness, acceptance and understanding of yourself. Keep yourself safe by allowing your expression to be appropriate in the context of the situation, and love all parts of you.

Be lovingly-intended toward yourself. You deserve it. All of you.