the cultivating resilience and joy project
Starting September 22nd
This past year has been one of major life transitions for me personally. Last August, my dad passed on, in September the first of my twin sons got married, in January my husband retired, in April the second twin got married and just last week, he converted to a named religion. Each of these events was completely appropriate in a normal, healthy human life. Yet each came with its own mixed bag of both joy and sorrow for me to process. On reflection, these four men represent 95% of my family. As they go through transitions in their lives, by necessity I must go through my own personal transitions and hopefully growth to find my new place in their lives. Where do I fit into the lives of my married sons and their wives? I’ve had to let go of the role I have held for 30 years as their mom and all that goes into raising a kid, and take a step back into a new, completely unfamiliar role where my advice and insights are not welcome. They both chosen smart, capable, wonderful women who are the perfect partners for them. And that changes the shape and dynamic of our family. I am no longer the most important woman in their lives. Of course, I am thrilled that they have found their life partners, and at the same time, it is a loss for me. These life events have felt like a boomerang in my heart of alternating expansion and contraction. It is a lot to process in a short time.
I share this with you because it is an example of a difficult transition in normal, natural life. We all have them. No tragedy here, no one is sick or injured or not exactly where they should be. I am so lucky. These passages are uncomfortable and at the same time once in a lifetime invitation to metamorphosis. I hope I am paying enough attention and care to bring in all the support I need to be fully butterflied by Life. Both in terms of the beautiful insect and in the culinary sense, because at times it does feel a little bloody. For me, this type of metamorphic transformation is the whole point of a human life. It is how LIFE provides opportunities for us move closer and closer to our most authentic selves, human beings fulfilling their soul’s mission for this lifetime. It is like sand in an oyster where the irritation becomes a lustrous pearl. It is indeed alchemy. Turning the dense lead of our sturggles and wounds into the golden light of the soul.
In the moments when we are in contact with the golden light and high vibration of our souls, we experience Joy. We all want more of that!
Cultivating Resilience and Joy is a project I started back in 2021. The idea is to give more people tools to use in their lives to facilitate their own metamorphosis. To learn to more effectively take the grit of their lives and transform it to pearls.
At this point in human evolution and history, not only do we have our own personal gritty transitions, but the world around us is changing rapidly requiring us to be in a constant state of adaptation, which is exhausting. The world and humanity need all the butterflies, pearls and golden light they can get at this time to help with the greatest metamorphosis of all, the birth of a new era.
PEI in July…photo doesn’t begin to do it justice
You know how when you try to tell your friend about a really great trip or concert you just experienced, you can never convey the magnitude or the felt experience through words alone? So, then you pull out your phone to share some pictures… which also are inadequate to convey the feelings of awe, love, or joy that you experienced. The Cultivating Resilience and Joy project is like that. It is very hard for me to fully describe what this monthly gathering of women has to offer you. You kinda have to be there…
This is my attempt, nonetheless.
Generally, as a healer/acupuncturist, my work is a fulfillment of my life’s purpose, to serve, alleviate suffering, and facilitate the alchemy of transformation in the lives of the folks I work with. Helping people to live more deeply into their own individual authenticity is personally thrilling and part of my soul’s mission. When we are living the life we came to live, when we are living into our soul’s mission for this lifetime, when we are able to manifest all our inherited gifts and talents, the natural outcome of that is resilience and joy. When life feels stressful, it is nearly impossible to fully manifest our potential.
My offering of this class is an extension of my work with individuals. Particularly the facilitation of the alchemy of transformation in people’s lives so that they too can live in ways that fulfill their lives’ purposes. In this way, my work can reach and support more people than otherwise would be possible in one-on-one treatment.
Currently, every few days, something major, unprecedented and at least slightly shocking is happening somewhere in the world and often here in the United States. We don’t have the time and capacity to integrate and make sense of it all at the rate it is coming at us in addition to our own personal stuff. From the outrageous behavior of politicians, to a judicial system that is undermining basic human rights, to the tragic effects of human-caused global warming, to the tragedy of war, to unraveling of the social fabric by ideological polarization. In every area of life, our current civilization has run it course to the end. We are in a period of time when the old era is dying and the new one is not here yet. Transitions are always chaotic and messy, and this one is made more intense by the fact every living being, human and otherwise including the Earth herself are in a do-or-die transition into a new era all at the same time. We don’t have a map for this territory. There is no guidebook. We’re in a time that is extremely disorienting, stressful, and anxiety provoking. When we are living in such a high level of chaos and uncertainty, our nervous systems are on alert and tied up with simply making sure we are safe. We have very little bandwidth left for awe, wonder, magic, hope, love, or joy. Those are much higher up on the hierarchy of needs. But this is where creativity and inspiration live as well which we desperately need to access in order to give birth to a Thriving Life Future. We need ways to support ourselves through the chaos of this time in history so that our hearts can be a place of awe, wonder, magic, hope, love, and joy.
Those of us alive today chose to incarnate at this time to be a part of the radical transformation that is taking place at every level of life on earth. Let me repeat that. We chose, on the level of our souls, to be here for this transition. This is part of our soul’s mission for us. What this is telling us is that our souls are longing for the radical learning opportunities that only an environment like this can offer. We belong to the Earth, she is our mother. If she is evolving and undergoing radical transformation, humanity is too. We are not separate from that. Humanity’s arrogant assumption that we are separate from and superior to the Earth is what has gotten us into this mess. She is a living, spiritual being and she is transforming because she simply has to under the pressure of humanities abuse over centuries. It is exactly the same pattern as I have experienced over the last year when the individuals in my family have made transitions that invites/forces my metamorphosis. We can go hard or we can go easy, but we will be transformed.
A family, community, state, nation, and culture are all defined by the individuals within them. Humanity is being forced to undergo a transformation, which means that each individual person on earth at this time must also undergo their own personal transformation. This kind of global, personal transformation is also unprecedented. Again, this is very unsettling because we have no maps. There is nothing in our history books for this new territory. But this work is absolutely crucial to the next stage of evolution that the Earth herself and Humanity are wanting to bring into existence. A world of peace, abundant, thriving life, and respect and love for all beings, human and otherwise.
We have no maps or guidebooks for this period in time because a totally new era is waiting to be born. We really haven’t any clue as to what the new era could look like, so how could we possibly know how to manifest it? Clearly, the way we have been doing things isn’t working. How do we find a new path forward? We go back to the point when things started getting distorted by greed, power and patriarchy and start from there, of course. Just like when you are in a strange city and you get lost. You go back to the point where you knew where you were, and start again.
We know two things: first that our current ways of problem solving got us here, and second, we incarnated to be part of the transition into a new era. Where do we look to find Real clues that are outside of our current ways of thinking?
Taoist philosophy offers us a simple yet deeply profound way of understanding how life here on Earth works. The key is that unlike most ancient cultures, they wrote it down, about 2500 years ago, and it has managed to survive through time. Its principles are as true today as they were then. They work with the phases of energy that are the result of the earth’s yearly journey around the sun and how those energies give rise to all of creation. Here in Maine, we readily experience the result of this movement in the seasons, for example. We can consider this a set of Real clues left for us from a time before our current distorted thinking. In Taoist philosophy, humans and every other living being arise from a template handed down from our ancestors. In the case of a plant, the template is stored in a seed and when sun, soil, and water are added, all the potential of the seed comes to life. A whole oak tree is stored in an acorn. The template in the seed is the map for the plant to follow to its highest potential. The acorn contains the step-by-step instructions of becoming a towering oak tree. It might take a couple hundred years, but it is all there.
We are no different. In human beings, the template (or seed, if you will) is formed when the egg and sperm came together to make us. In modern terms, we might call it our DNA. In the last 2000 years, each of us had 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 ancestors who contributed their DNA to our templates. That is a 100 quintillion people that went into making each one of us, as we are here, in this most recent era of western civilization. In our DNA, our individual template, we carry a thread of deep connection and knowing all the way back to the time when the Taoists were writing down their very clear understandings of how the Universe works and beyond. Understanding just a little bit of Taoist Five Element theory is like a Rosetta stone that unlocks the secrets we carry deep within our template and opens up the possibility that we too can live more fully into our potential and soul’s mission in this life.
Each of us is charged with the opportunity (dare I say, responsibility) to dive deep, to come to know and live into the truest, most authentic, highest vibration version of ourselves. This is how we find the new map to navigate and bring first ourselves and then collectively, humanity into a co-creative relationship with the Earth. Each of us individually needs to find our own map that then combines with family, community, and society’s authentic maps to bring humanity into a new, Thriving Life era. It may take a few hundred years, but we have to start somewhere.
Cultivating Resilience and Joy is my Rosetta stone offering to you. I hope you will join us on this journey.
We are a gathering of women who meet on the third Sunday of each month to participate in the alchemy of transformation for ourselves, in service to the Earth and humanity as a whole. Each month, as we travel around the sun, we will align ourselves with the energies giving rise to creation, ourselves included. The week before each gathering, I will provide you with a prompt to guide you in choosing an item for our collective altar that connects you to these greater movements of nature and to the hearts of the women in our group. We will spend some time learning to see our lives and this time in history through the lens of the five elements which serves a map to locate us in the cosmos through its set of elemental truths. We have time for discussion followed by a meditation before we say good-bye till next time.
This year we are starting September 22nd, we will meet at Camden Whole Health in Camden from 4 to 6 pm. This is a hybrid class, so you could join us from anywhere. Recordings will be available.
I hope you join us.
If you are unsure what it is all about you are welcome to come sit in on the first gathering to get a sense. Please email me and that can be arranged.