Traditionally interpreted as a song about staying true to another person, the title by Fats Waller dropped into my mind for another reason: staying true to you. For the purposes of this post, “misbehave” means behaving in any way that isn’t authentic to your essence; it’s any action or non action that is an untrue expression of your soul signature. So stepping away from conventional standards if those have you in their grip, is essential to know if you’re behavin’ or misbehavin’. You may also need to allow a lot of space around what you’ve been conditioned to believe is right and good as well as timeline management on what needs to happen when, if it applies to you behavin’. Here it can be especially important to remember that we humans have created time and the ideas around how life *should be mapped out. Just go ahead and let yourself drop any should right now unless you’re applying it to what feels true to your heart and brings peace to your mind while upholding the highest good of all. This may also require looking at what the “highest good” means with a soft heart and deep trust in the intelligence of your emotional body.
We are at the threshold of the Snow Moon today and it’s Imbolc as well. It feels as if the Bone Mother calls on those ready to dive into fierce introspection. She is a prominent Slavic figure depicted in folklore as a sort of wicked grandmother. She is a powerful, wise, forest-dweller who may help you or devour you depending on the way wild nature moves through her when you cross paths. She represents the space between the living and the unknown, owning fears, and standing face to face with the untamed parts of yourself while opening to initiate radical transformation. She’s not too unlike the Hindu Goddess Kali in some respects, but Baba Yaga claims the power of the Crone; the old woman that many seek to overlook through repression as useless and no longer desirable. That’s a trick, of course, to keep you from knowing her as an archetypal ascended master.
If she doesn’t scare you off, consider calling on her for support in your shadow work under the last Full Moon of this Wood Snake Lunar Year. Ways to support yourself with the final shed through shadow integration:
Confront Fears: Make a Trigger Board. You may have heard of Vision Boards and you may or may not have had good luck with those. They can be an excellent tool for creating new experiences if your fears aren’t holding you back in some way. To Make a Trigger Board, you may only need tools for visuals of words and some paper with honest reflection about your triggers. List the things that you know hold you back. If words are effective enough for you, let that be but if visuals are more helpful, bring in printed images or magazine cut outs of the images that are going to be most helpful to your true processing of what holds you back. Write and/or cut and paste with intention on the paper or poster board of your choosing.
Devour Fears: Hold the words and images in your view. Consider ways you may respond differently. You may have to devour your ego to do this successfully. Invite an image of Baba Yaga into your mind and ask her how to devour your ego. Ask her how to gobble up your fears. Give some quiet space to see what surfaces as an answer or answers. Be gentle with yourself as you do this. Don’t rush through the quiet space, in fact, let there be more quiet space than you think you need.
Reclaim Your Power: Aim to be open to the different responses you gather. Let yourself imagine moving past any triggers and fears with as much loving grace as possible. Spend time seeing yourself reclaim your power in any scenario where you may have gone quiet before, questioned yourself, or reworked back into a known pattern instead of progressing in a way that would help you to make the gains you seek. Comfort sometimes becomes more appealing than change and we stay in ruts we know aren’t helping us. This is a time to be honest about that. Create visuals in your mind or externally of how you feel after you’ve moved past your fear and revisit these as often as you need to convince yourself it’s better on the other side of comfort and fear.
Forest as Reset: Get into the woods if you can after your trigger work. Let Nature hold you and help you to self-heal. Be with the earth in reverence and witness yourself moving with a lighter heart. Earth will hold you every chance you give her.
Sending so many good wishes to the brave souls approaching shadow work. If you find yourself in too deep, remember to call on a therapist to assist you. Some caverns are deeper than others and asking for support to help you out of there may be what’s needed! Love yourself enough to do what’s right for you.
A week ago a friend and I drove out to see the Monks passing through North Carolina on their peace walk. We brought along high spirits with fruit and flower offerings for them. We didn’t have many details but knew their lunch spot and planned to connect there. We found easy parking and as we made our way to the highway a woman walking back to her car stopped to speak with us. She was returning from witnessing the monks walk in and asked if she could take my picture with the beautiful flowers. I posed smiling with roses lifted while she angled her phone. She asked if I was Buddhist. I stood there holding the roses and a dragon fruit next to my friend with her bag full of oranges, apples, and bananas while I thought for a moment how to respond to her:
“I’m a Loveist.
We are here to be part of peace and love in action.”
She shared that she is a Buddhist and didn’t know there would be so many non Buddhists present but was happy to see people bridging across religions for peace. She gave us some directional guidance and we set back towards the highway to their lunching spot.
While it turned out that they were delayed from the schedule we planned around and we didn’t end up seeing the monks exit that day. We did stand outside their resting spot for two hours holding space for peace with others doing the same. We stood in the expectation of spiritual offering, energetic support, and allegiance to peace. It was a beautiful reminder to breathe deep, hope for the best, and practice contentment with what presents.
“Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being redirected to something better.” — Steve Maraboli
Rejection can be such a difficult emotion to experience. Oftentimes it takes a long while to look back and see how that showed up in life as a redirection to something that was better for you. Maybe that something better is not what mass opinion would note as better -but for you, it’s the better match. Sometimes this rejection can be experienced as coming from another person not wanting to be in relationship with you, a series of events that keeps you from realizing a dream, a situation at work going sour, no call backs from your auditions, or any number of ways you may know this happens that I’ve yet to encounter myself or through conversation with others. We can even feel rejection when it was not intended depending on how our expectations have set us up to interact with others and to respond to ourselves.
Rejection is difficult, however, shifting to the mindset that there’s no such thing as rejection and replacing it with redirection is quite the liberator. The sooner you can get to assuming you’ve been redirected whenever rejection is present, the sooner you’ll feel trust in what’s occurring. It’s worth assuming and in this case assumption won’t wreak any sort of havoc in your life. There are little ways we can nurture ourselves that have big pay offs and this is one of them. If you can start here, today, with replacing any rejection experience you’ve had with redirection, the benefits will start to appear immediately.
Affirmation: I am always directed in ways that are better for me than I could have guessed. Any rejection is actually redirection towards better alignment.
“In the Divine Plan, every righteous desire of the heart is satisfied”. – Florence Scovel Shinn
When I was 17 I had the inspiration to write a list of what I wanted in life. I included details about my ideal partner, my children, how it would feel to be together, and how I would feel with all those things secured. I sealed up the list in an envelope and I tucked it into my favorite book at the time.
Twelve years later, I was packing up to move to another state with that ideal partner and those two kids just in the gender order I had specified, and the forgotten list fell out of the book. I paused for a long while looking over what 17 year old me had very directly listed I wanted to have and I felt everything freeze around me seeing it all received. I HAD EVERYTHING I WANTED. That may look like a lovely blessing and I definitely felt it as such at the time. I was a bit wowed at how I had simply listed it all and easily received it all without toiling over it. I didn’t repeatedly look at the list and wonder about how it would happen. I just clearly stated what I wanted and let it go. So this realization of how life *can work shifted into my conscious awareness and I say it like this because I have no doubt that some unconscious part of me understood already. It also helps that I wasn’t asking for anything outside of the realm of what we consider to be common occurrence. Those things take more trust and imagination to bring about.
As the move continued on, I didn’t think about the list much more but in the year to come, I found myself begin questioning everything I thought I understood about reality. HOW did that happen exactly? I began to feel curious about astrology and venture down pathways to understand different lenses of life as well as to write poetry and some short stories regularly which caused me to seek inspiration points in others. I found observing the qualities in others as well the way people relate to one another to be an excellent past time; it was super informative for how reality appears to be different depending on the participants.
As more time passed, I began to have symptoms of what many refer to as spiritual awakening. I felt different in my reality, with contrast coming up between me and those around me. I saw others differently than I had seen them before because I was changing. I learned to respond differently to the reality to heal the unhealthy patterns that were playing. I devoted myself to creating a healthier physical form after childbirths and within that began a practice of Kundalini yoga which I attribute now to the pattern awareness that occurred. When I first practiced this yoga I felt like I would vomit after every session for many weeks, and yet for some reason I kept doing it with adjustments here and there to help myself through that reaction. More recently, in a training to teach Kundalini, I understood that was a release of toxins in my body. The breath work and the lymphatic cleanse cleared so much energetic density from my body and it was absolutely worth it to do that work and to ultimately feel better. This also meant becoming more sensitive to my body and what my body needed as well as what it did not need.
I became more sensitive to everything around me as well. I could always read people with ease, but their motivations began to become apparent to me and I could feel their feelings too so that a person’s energy would speak to me before they ever said a word. I found this to be overwhelming for a time, wishing I could just process myself and not so much other information at once too. As I learned to anchor into this way of experiencing life, my external reality took on some challenges that didn’t match that original list at all. Everything I wanted was shifting into an external expression that wasn’t at all what I wanted, but now that I’m a decade deep into venturing away from the list, I’ll say I’ve come to view the growth that has occurred as it’s own blessing. Loss is a great teacher. I’ve learned to have gratitude in each day, to let forgiveness be an ever-present practice, to be mindful of what I speak, that saying less and sometimes nothing is more effective than anything I could have uttered, how to give without a thought for what may come back, how to expect the best from others knowing that allows them to show up as such, and how to love others as well as myself unconditionally. I’ve also learned to trust the universe to know best what’s in alignment with my highest good and to welcome what shows up in my reality now under that frequency.
Sometimes our ego and our soul want or need different things. Making sure they’re aligned is imperative. Otherwise, it could be that everything you want is only in service to a particular aspect of you, but not in service to the whole. That moment of thinking “I have everything I wanted” for me was a gateway to one of many spiritual awakenings. Sometimes Spirit creates a little precursor moment to releasing the ego because the soul has other plans.
Many of us are accustomed to complacency in our comforts and perceived freedom. We are trapped by something or another and on the edge of collapse. What has fed us no longer can. Morals have taken on legs and arms to dress themselves differently so we don’t recognize them anymore. I see again and again they’ve walked away completely from some.
The soul, if to survive, will have to revolt.
Being present at this moment may create discomfort and that’s okay. Being positive at this moment may mean being sure of what you can stand by and what you cannot.
“The use of the violet consuming flame is more valuable to you and to all mankind than all the wealth, all the gold and all the jewels of this planet. ” – Saint Germain
I first came across a book on use of the Violet Flame in a chain bookstore while my husband at the time and I were there. He was lego interested and I was not particularly, so I found myself wandering over to the new age spirituality section which I hadn’t spent time in since my late teenage years. Somehow I was interested to peek there with no current reading agenda that required a purchase but because I had recently been given a gift card to the store, there I was.
I stumbled across a very small book tucked in to the shelf called, “The Violet Flame”. Having an incredible fondness for the word violet, I had to peek. I’ll explain myself a bit more: My great aunt was named Violet and she made herself available to care for me as a premature infant, living with my family for a time period until I had grown to the point that my parents felt comfortable with other arrangements. She and I developed a sweet bond that continued on until she passed away when I was twelve. Besides this, the previous husband with me at the store had partially grown up on Violet Court and was living there when I met him, and one of my favorite group song projects from my freshmen year of school was Das Veilchen by Mozart which you may guess means “The Violet”. It’s a funny little song about a violet who wishes more than anything to be plucked and held by a maiden he admires. Instead of his wish, she tramples him and still he is satisfied because it was her… So I was drawn to the word Violet and had to know about this flame. The book had bits in it that rubbed me the wrong way at the time because of religious intonations but the curiosity I felt was stronger than the uncomfortableness. I bought it along with some other treasures that day.
I began with the prayers in the book as meditations and chose to think of them like that so that I could move past my limitations and just see how those words may work in my life. The more I recited the words, which I did about three times a day, the lighter I felt. Forgiveness began to move through me in new ways and other books began to show up in my life that allowed me to work even more thoroughly with forgiveness and compassion for memories that replayed of childhood challenges and scenarios that cropped up as a newish parent myself. The words I found in this book allowed me to go back into memories and release what was difficult as well as to do that in the moment when I found myself feeling blaming energy. The words helped me again years down the road when I found myself living without a husband and doing my best to offer steady, balanced, and loving parenting to my children so they wouldn’t need to go into their memories as adults to forgive mistreatment. However, I’m not claiming to be a perfect parent here. I’m sure my children will have things they plan to do differently and if they can make improvements, I applaud them. I hope they will.
In hindsight, I know this little book was a gift to come across and in the case it helps you now, I’ll share one of the prayers I found to be especially supportive:
I AM Forgiveness acting here, Casting out all doubt and fear, Setting men forever free With wings of cosmic Victory.
I AM calling in full power For Forgiveness every hour; To all life in every place I flood forth forgiving Grace.
If you choose to work with this text, it’s also lovely to close your eyes and visualize a gently warming violet flame holding you as you recite. As you grow more comfortable, see the flame growing also. Let the flame grow to hold your home, your neighborhood, your community, and beyond until you have the entire planet wrapped in the violet flame with forgiving grace circling everyone and everything.
Forgiveness is important work and the more you can forgive, the better life will be. Hope you decide to try this out, dearest ones.
“Keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Fill your life with love. Scatter sunshine. Forget self, think of others. Do as you would be done by. Try this for a week and you will be surprised.” – Norman Vincent Peale
If you can invite the concept of self- emptying, creating a void space within you, and then making yourself into a cup ready to be filled, you may be delighted with what follows. As an empty vessel, allow yourself to be filled and to empty again and again. Let your thoughts and your feelings come and go so that you become a vessel for life to flow to, through, and from you in beautiful ways. The perception of emptiness as a problem is all in the eye of the beholder. What if the moments of emptiness are actually full of potential ready to take new form based on what you are prepared to hold?
In order to become empty, meditation is necessary. You must learn to still your mind even if only for small increments. The more “nothingness” you create within, the more presence and potentiality you invite. The thoughts will still come. The feelings will still come. It’s okay to hear them and feel them and then to notice if you can detach to let them fall away. The more this is practiced, the more the small self diminishes so that the wisdom of your soul can shine through. Let yourself be wonderfully surprised by “emptiness” perhaps better felt as “openness to receive” while also letting yourself take inspired action (such as giving to others, participating in creative projects, saying or doing the thing that you know needs your attention, showing up to places that call you, remembering to bring all of your awareness into the present moment, etc.) without concern for fullness coming into play. It will come and it will go.
“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up” — Paul Valéry.
We could look at this quote and marvel at the simplicity of first getting yourself out of bed everyday and consistently moving towards your dreams: one step at the time. To shift yourself from contemplation to actionable reality perhaps was what the French poet intend we derive. However, I can’t help but pull multiple meanings from this every time my eyes scan over the words. Perhaps we’ve been in one way of thinking too long and we must wake up to a pattern. Maybe it’s that we’ve been excusing behavior from others that limits us and we have to wake up to claiming our own right to space and expression. It’s even possible that we’ve settled into relationships that were comfortable for us at one point in time but as we all grow and change, we have to remember to wake up to the present and not the past versions because who we and they were five, ten, twenty years ago isn’t the same as today. Life may cause us to go through something that shifts us in a particular way to prepare us for a new way of being that we have to wake up to. From yet another perspective, perhaps the dominant energy in whatever life dynamics we find ourselves is providing the perfect illusions to keep us small and working in systems that deter our growth or keep us dependent on someone else’s dream or base desires. Within the same thinking, it could also be that our energy feeds the demands of another and we have so little left for our own wants and dreams that we begin to feel deflated. Perhaps we don’t even know what to dream anymore…
There are so many ways we may find ourselves waking up to reclaim and probably redefine our right to dream. Please don’t assume these dreams have to be big to be valuable. The smallest dreaming is quite powerful and affirming. You may find small dreams are the most rewarding all along your path. We certainly all deserve to live nourished and free in our hearts desires – surrounded by those who help us remember our sacred sovereignty.
What happens when you avoid or dismiss something or someone that makes you uncomfortable? Perhaps you bypass it or them because you think it’s not worth your while but yet when it rolls around into your awareness there’s a kind of stickiness there and maybe even a sting.
As we wind down 2025, year of the snake and shedding, what if you let whatever this could be in your life have a bit more airtime? What if you expand to meet it and even include it or them in your field with conscious awareness. Let avoidance be part of your shed, dear one. The sooner you meet whatever / whomever this is with your heart light, the sooner you embody peace and wellbeing with yourself across all aspects of your life.
This is not to say you should sit in difficult feelings for a long time but acknowledgment with the light of the heart helps to transmute these feelings into neutrality, and with more and more practice, you can even shift the feelings into loving acceptance and possibly joy.
Presence and Positivity 