Introduction

Looking back over the last several years, my writings below reveal the deeply, powerful, spiritual truth that asserts an old and new school ‘personal is political’ mindset. By that I mean the direct, observational experience of learning to live in alignment with strong feminine energy, and redefining masculinity. Instead of seeking to change the world as it is to conform to my egocentric desires; it’s recognizing that we are all part of what Carl Jung called the Collective Consciousness. 

From this dimensional shift, there is an understanding that consciousness manifests itself in infinite ways. For example, Colonization is a real generational trauma revealing a culture of learned helplessness that faces the human plight. The price tag of ‘isims’, and peddling a system that segregates us into labels of winners and losers is a criminally insane mindset that is sold to us as normal. But like the wisdom of the yin and the yang; without that imbalance, there would be no harmonic convergence of the Tao.  

From an energetic perspective, abundance is an energy field available to everyone that reminds us that there is enough, and we can all win. Just imagine free, clean energy and equal access to equitable resources. A deeper and higher application of the ‘personal is political’ viewpoint is the soul’s recognition of waking up to the fact that the journey in healing truly starts from the inside out. 

Cocreating heaven on earth isn’t a pipe dream when enough of us understand this in a way that positively shifts the energetic footprint of the planet and beyond. All this means is what the mental health community calls coregulation and attunement. Our energy affects one another, for better and for worse. Might as well discover novel ways to harmonize with our environment. By remembering to breathe consciously, we are more likely to live in the present moment. 

I remember when the gospel of Coronavirus was spreading its wings back in March 2020. It seemed that overnight the world had changed, especially for humans. However, from a systemic and spiritual perspective, there was another way to look at the pandemic even at the time it was happening. 

For example, after the shutdown, there were stories about a significant reduction in fossil fuels that gave birth to seeing the skyline in places like the Himalayas when smog once blocked pristine views. Moreover, with the arrival of the Coronavirus, humanity was given a deeper way to look at the Crown Chakra opening up, as in the energetic Corona atop our heads. This is akin  to the perceptible ring that sometimes circles the moon or the halos depicted in some of Michelangelo’s art.

Like everyone else, my life didn’t get easier during the pandemic. Do you remember seeing and hearing the lyrics, “I can’t breathe?” Those lyrics resonated with yours truly on a deeply personal level, and by the Full Moon in June of 2020, the feeling of being suffocated climaxed for me because my soul felt trapped. Like it or not, the uncertainty and unknowns in life became louder and impossible to ignore because our convenient distractions from turning inward were taken away. How do we all sit with that? 

In retrospect, COVID revived that suffocating soul-trapped feeling I thought I had overcome. Yet, like Stephen King’s IT character Pennywise, the suffocation revealed  its ugly head once again; thus, reinforcing the suffocating grip of my childhood exposure to mother’s crippling depression, multiple suicide attempts; as well as her final terribly tragic death by suicide that was attached to my being. 

As I reflect back to my late 30s-early 40s, I realized how much work I had invested in myself to rework that feeling. However, being in a committed relationship, and a traditional marriage to the same person for a quarter of a century brought that feeling of suffocation back. My soul felt trapped when the sense of suffocation would come and go. Sometimes, the suffocating feeling would  lay dormant, while other times growing louder. But it was always there.

Overcoming my own victim consciousness has been a journey of awakening to this truth: when I have felt slighted in life, it took a lot of inner work to see the mirror reflecting back to me of  how I have slighted myself and others. Examining these tendencies and experiences isn’t sexy and is quite unappealing. But the key to confronting BS with honesty is that it’s nothing short of alchemy. It is a truly magical experience on the inside. The thing about Bull Shit is that it makes for good internal compost and mulch, if you’ll pardon the pun..

Additionally, I had conned myself into believing that COVID hadn’t affected me. As a school social worker, it was difficult not being able to go to work, and witnessed firsthand how challenging it had been for everyone since schools shut down in March. I did my best to stay connected by linking up with students, coworkers, and family online. Elevating my technology game by building a school website as a resource, and scheduling google meets were empowering. But what really helped was simplifying my life by decluttering and starting a new training program, which proved to be an effective self-care strategy.

Following my meltdown on the Full Moon in June 2020, I would get up in the morning and meditate, lift weights and then go out for a long run. After my run I would cool down in the yard. At night I would stargaze and mediate again before going to sleep. I linked up with an online spiritual community and started listening to meditation downloads to upgrade my internal systems. 

When we returned to school in the fall, I spent most of my time going to work, then heading home, and into the woods to reconnect and recharge in nature. I needed to simplify my life and make myself smaller again. It was a leveling and humbling time. Nothing glamorous at that time in my life. Like the state of the world, my marriage was on life support, and I was having a really hard time living with my family. Granted, I had acted like more than a jackass, but underneath my own theatrics, I didn’t feel welcome in my own home. You can’t force something if it’s just not right anymore. But I don’t give up easily and I didn’t want to feel like a failure, so I pressed on by trying to correct the error of my ways and heal myself from the inside out. 

At 50, reflecting on the past 25 years of adulthood, reminded me that I had to face my fears with courage. Trying to work through my shit within the confines of my marriage had become an act of self-deception that I could no longer tolerate. It was really hard for me to admit to myself or my past wife that I just couldn’t do it anymore. Our relationship had served its purpose, and we were just better off to throw in the towel and part ways. I don’t like to disappoint people, so I would have a tendency to tell her what she wanted to hear rather than speaking my truth. God knows I tried, but I struggled deeply with the idea of seeing myself as a failure for not making our marriage work. The truth is, I tried to envision my past wife in my future, but I just couldn’t any longer. This was an agonizing feeling for me for a long time. But in life, you either learn to sit with the tension of opposites or you don’t. Given my own experiences with trying on both hats; the latter is far less of an effective strategy than the former. 

As if that wasn’t enough, another woman’s presence became increasingly clear and undeniable over the past eight years. We had developed a clean connection, maintaining a professional yet friendly relationship as coworkers. But in the summer of 2023, something shifted within me, prompting me to write a poem titled Watching Clouds as a way to process my emotions and surrender to the Universe.

I believe that a man and a woman should be able to have an open-minded and open-hearted conversation about their feelings, which is exactly what we did. Of course, talking about feelings and acting on them are two different things. We discovered that the mutual feelings had been growing in both of us for quite some time, albeit for different reasons, given the state of our marriages, and where we were both moving in our journey’s.

I was trying to hold on until my daughter left for college, hoping to cushion the blow. I ended up living day to day in a hotel for about a month before realizing that I needed to officially move out and find my own place. If that wasn’t challenging enough, during this period, my father-in-law passed away, my birth father appeared to himself as on his deathbed that winter, and my long-term spiritual counselor became gravely ill and passed away in the spring of 2024. It felt like nature’s cycle of death and rebirth was unfolding right in the theater of my life.

The writings below are reflective of how my life experiences have inspired the universality of my journalistic poetic prose. When I write, I think about my own self in relation to the greater planet and universe at large. Whenever I write, I aim to connect the dots by addressing universal issues that transcend the labels we identify with. The idea is to create an experience of inspiration, connection and co-regulation with the reader. I am thankful for my good fortune, and merely wish that everyone else could have it even better, in a way that’s fair and equitable. It’s taken me a long time to feel deserving of abundance, but we all deserve it and the infinite forms that it takes root in within our shared 3-D realm and beyond. 

I hope that you enjoy your travels down the rabbit holes of these truly amazing stories. Who knows? Perhaps they will awaken new vistas within your own stories. Are they simply fixed old mental tapes, or are they portals into sovereign new experiential narratives waiting to be explored, and discovered?

A Letter To Ari From His Future Self

Like you teach others, just picture peaceful, calming thoughts and focus primarily on positive self-talk. This isn’t pollyanna. Lead with your heart and remember your head. They are meant to be in alignment with one another. When your heart isn’t into something, you can’t manufacture it or force something that just isn’t right. As with any loss, there is grief when experiencing the death of the old self. You have already known the Dark Night of the Soul experience. Follow the Universal pillars of Love and Truth. You know that being in alignment with these principles will set you free.

Be mindful that when one door closes, another one opens. Try not to get seduced by your fears. Rather, just be mindful of them. You can even transform them into spirit guides, much like you’ve done with your anger and past lives. What matters most is that you live the life you are meant to in this lifetime. You are already seeing that there comes a time when old contracts need to be broken and released. Let them go. Surrender and trust the Universe to carry you where you need to go.

Remember how devastated you were when your mom died? Of course you felt orphaned and abandoned. It wasn’t personal; it was simply where she was in her life, doing what she believed she had to do. And then your grandparents left this earth, albeit on more conventional terms. Listen wisely to the lessons from past breakups, the severing of old relationships, and shifts in peer groups, including changes in your own identity. Yes, these were transitions, and not without their challenges. Lots of thoughts and feelings were experienced by you, including pain and suffering, however, there were also profound spiritual transformations that emerged from all your experiences up to this point, and this growth will continue to expand exponentially. As you are becoming more anchored in the earth with your root, you are also growing stronger wings to soar like an eagle. Meditation on Eagle’s powerful balance of the intersection between their wings and talons reflect balance of Heaven and Earth or spirit and material reality.

We know marriage and raising a child has not been easy on you, just as it isn’t easy for anyone. You know full well that you have a hard time with traditional marriage. Being married to and having a relationship with a Virgo for all these years has been a grounding force in your life. Believe you me, the gravity has been good for your Pisces need for a strong anchor during your rapidly shifting tides at times. Even though this has not always been appreciated by you.

However, as you have relaxed your resistance, you have deepened your understanding of how this has made you stronger in the material realm, which is what Virgo personifies. As such, your capacity for empathy has deepened for concrete viewpoints so that you can see more from left brain systems of thought. Partnerships should be based on a mutual agreement, and free choice; not a one-sided paradigm or staying in it to protect someone else’s feelings, neediness or codependent tendencies. The old world vows of till death do us part, as a reason to stay in the marriage, no longer hold  up for us- from a concrete, 3-D perspective, at least. Besides, a death to us parting; from an energetic perspective, is akin to the death of the old self. We don’t always want to say yes to the person we are becoming because it’s natural to cling to our old self or the way we were. All systems resist change. 

While failure is part of life, it doesn’t mean you have failed at marriage. Remember the Law of Impermanence that recognizes that the one constant in life is change. You have evolved and will continue to do so.