A couple weeks ago, while vibing pretty hard with the almost-full-moon, I googled “antonyms of punishment”. You know, just for fun.

Here are a few that melted me liquid like honey: forgiveness. blessing. approval. amnesty. deliverance. gentleness. indulgence. mercy. praise. protection. release.

Yes. YES TO ALL OF THOSE.

My whole body seemed to fill and float like a sponge.

Self-punishment is guilt in action. It’s a barrier between our gifts and a world desperate for us to use them.

When we choose one of those other words to inform our actions, we generate love.
We create a higher vibration.
We allow new opportunities for wholeness, wellbeing, power, and joy to open up.
We enable the Divine to breathe deeper in us.
We grow our life a little more lush.
We serve our clients, relationships, and self from higher ground.
We recognize our gifts like old friends emerging from a crowd.
We end the cycle of struggle.
Doesn’t that sound delicious?

If you’re ready for your business to feel like a living, breathing benediction for you and everyone it touches, let’s talk.

It’s okay if you didn’t reinvent yourself today.

It’s okay if you didn’t transform, transmute, or transcend anything.

It’s okay if an old habit reintroduced itself. It’s okay if you didn’t make everyone happy.

It’s okay if you forgot, remembered, took too long, went too fast, or didn’t set an intention.

It’s okay if you didn’t feel particularly sparkly every second you were awake.

You’re here.
You’re enough.

The Warrior Archetype.

She burns away the sweet talk and making nice. After all, you’re not here to be nice. Kind, sure. Humble, yes. Grounded in your divinity, absolutely. But you’re not here to contort yourself to keep everyone comfortable.

When I work with my Inner Warrior, she makes a beautiful mess. Through that mess, She clarifies like no other.

She isn’t ladylike or polite.

In fact, She relishes the activities that tend to make people cringe-y and uncomfortable.

A few examples:

She sees, binds, and slays demons. She has excellent night vision and she uses it to hunt the darkness. When she’s done, she licks the blood off her blades.

She is shockingly blunt and brutally honest. Are you using karma or consciousness as an excuse to participate in something that’s toxic, misaligned, or low-vibration? She’ll let you know. There’s no malice in her truth-telling. It’s dry and factual, which can sound harsh. But at her fiery heart is Pure Love.

She doesn’t take a single second for granted. She is ferociously present. And she will drag you from past or future to this exact moment so you can look yourself full in face – the light, the dark, the mess, the miracle.

She’s a bit of a metaphysical pyro. Her delivery of wisdom and war is clean, not clouded with a lot of feelings, agendas, or desired outcomes. The preamble to that clean delivery, is a lake of fire. She’ll start it, bathe a whole situation in it, and pace the shorelines watching for what emerges solidified or burnt to a crisp.

She brings the cosmic balance of life AND death. As light chasers and awareness generators, it’s easy to gravitate towards the light. But we’re not all light. There’s rolled-up-sleeves and get-your-hands-dirty work to be done in ourselves and this world we live in. There’s insidious darkness to address. There are bullshit and platitudes to burn down. There are energetic strongholds of hatred, suffering, and apathy that need dismantling.

Let Her lose, friends. She has work to do.

Drumming is my favorite vibration for deep heart work preparation. I combine it with rib and hip isolations, letting Anahata (heart chakra energy) spiral its way gracefully into the ground, deeper and deeper, merging fiery and blissful with the core of our earth.

When we consider heart energy only in terms of flow and emotionality, we miss out on the power of a rooted and rhythmic heart. Roots and rhythm make movement and the movement of the heart creates a path for transcendence, healing, and feeling.

Ground your heart like a tree. Let it make its own wise way into Love.

You’ve made waiting a superpower
Turning your desire into a delicate pause
A total surrender to Divine Timing
And while your heart waited, it grew lush
Now it’s time to stop waiting, Beloved
Your heart is too irresistible to hold back.

I’ve been craving grapefruit for the past 48 hours. To be clear, I haven’t been thinking about grapefruit. I’ve been tasting its tang on my tongue. I’ve been feeling its little pockets of juice burst when I bite. I’ve been smelling its sharply sweet citrus so intensely that I half expected to find one magically waiting next to my laptop. That is a craving. It’s not a thought. It’s not a rational want or need. Rather it’s visceral. The primal union of a need and a want.

In the US, when we talk about cravings, our minds usually land on diet rhetoric fraught with terms like “curb your sugar craving.” Through that paradigm, we have collectively come to understand cravings as illicit thoughts that we must find a way to control. If there was ever a nod to our puritanical roots, it’s our attitudes toward and very definition of craving. We’ve put craving in a metaphoric corset and told her to sit down and shut up. We’ve given practicality precedence. And we’ve relegated cravings to chocolate (actually the iron in chocolate) when we have our periods.

Well, Loves, I don’t like chocolate. So I started considering my cravings, which strayed far from the norm. I started distinguishing between wanting (a thought) and craving (a sensual experience). Here’s what I’ve learned: Wants come and go. They can be forgotten. Cravings are persistent. They will not let you forget them until they’re sated. Wants emerge from a lack of something. Cravings emerge from a desire for something. They point us towards fullness. The purpose of cravings is not simply pleasure or play or satisfaction. A craving invites us to expand our capacity. When we answer our cravings we find ourselves transforming into the most powerful, lush versions of ourselves. We find ourselves ready, even hungry, for more in our lives.

When we start listening to our cravings, they demand a new kind of listening. Cravings are primal. They require us to remember ancient ways of listening. We need to metaphorically put our ears to the ground and wait for the distant vibration of footsteps. We need to pause, not just for a breath, but for the whiff of longing our breath might carry. Because cravings arrive in subtlety. They’re melted into the layers beneath our thoughts, beneath our skin. However, don’t mistake their subtlety for impotence or simplicity. Cravings are sensual. They’ll take us over, if we let them out of their cages.

They can turn you into a huntress, bent on feeding all her hungers. They can turn you into a creatrix, laser focused on making and birthing. They can turn you into a seductress, brimming with sovereignty and softness. Cravings are the flame in the dark leading you back to your inner fire.

So let me ask you: What are you craving?

Wide awake at 4am and deeply triggered by the results of the election, I reflected on this:

I am so fucking sick of binary conversations. I am fed up with narrow minds and fearful hearts that believe we can’t contain contradictions and find new solutions and outcomes. There is always a third way.

We no longer live in a world where muddling by is enough, where our calling is merely to survive another day. We no longer have the luxury of hiding behind resistance or platitudes as excuses for inaction.

You can fully honor how you feel and still show up in service of raising our collective vibration. You can work through pain and change lives at the same time. You can be spiritual and political. You can look our collective darkness full in the face with the glint of flinty joy in your heart. You can be infinitely powerful and simultaneously soft. You can feel ecstasy and despair in the same breath.

Many years in the past and many years in the future, right here in this moment, your soul made a decision. It heard and heeded a call to touch onto the earth right now at this very time in your exact body, to create change. You are here to create ripples of a new vibration.

As the world seethes with confusion, pain, helplessness, and redemption, you are not here to drawn a line in the sand. You are here to be a line in the sand. You are here to bring heaven to earth. You are the second coming. You are God incarnate. You are a living prayer. You are a revival. You are the Universe’s commitment to grace and light. You are sacred text and holy ground. You are Emmanuel, God with us.

Let’s start acting like it.

We often talk about healing in glowing terms. We invest time, effort, and financial resources into mending ourselves and moving through our blocks so we can live bright, glorious, rich lives. But what about when a wound begins to feel whole and that brings up more angst than celebration?

Wounds often inform so much of who we are. They build our strength, color the lens through which we see the world, and call our gifts out into the light. However, while we diligently (or not so diligently) work on them, they can become excuses or reasons to hold back or play small.

As you begin to feel whole, some questions might rise to surface in the wake of a healed wound. What will I be without this wound? What will I co-create with the Divine as the next iteration of my life? Without this excuse, what is God going to ask of me?

Healing can be so challenging because healing removes the excuse of the wound. We heal to break down the barriers between us and God. We heal to fill our hearts and dance into the life we’re made for.

Sometimes… That’s. Terrifying. It’s one thing to understand the healing journey cognitively. However, to feel that process in our hearts means watching the sun set on one version of ourselves and a new day dawn. It means touching the unknown with brave, trembling fingertips. It means stepping forward without being able to see the path before us or ground beneath us. It means practicing radical trust in ourselves and the Divine. That’s a monumental task and requires all of us, not bits and pieces or divided attention. It requires all of our brokenness and distraction. It demands all of our fear, avoidance, and denial. It asks for the totality of our being to enter into the healing journey and sacrifice the ways we hide.

So today, we pray: “God, may my life be an ever unfolding prophecy of triumph.”

I’ve been on the bridge between Catholicism and New Age Spirituality for years now and there’s something missing. There’s a critical piece that few people are talking about.

Worship.

We’ve got gratitude practices on one side, liturgy on another, and still a posture of the heart, an engagement and surrender of our spirit remains in the proverbial toolbox. Perhaps it’s the association with a more evangelical version of Christianity that causes us to shy away. Or perhaps that much power at our disposal, truly a way to step out of our pain, scares the shit out of us. Perhaps we believe that we’ll never have one-up on the darkness around us.

Instead, we prioritize pleasure, we pray, we set intention, we meditate, we create rituals, we draw oracle cards, we say the rosary, we attend mass or moon circles – different practices and forms for the same understanding: we are embodied divinity. We are bearers of Christ-light. We are light workers and change makers.

Amid this profound knowing, we are tasked with addressing darkness within and around us. Resistance, shadows, sin, trauma, excruciating pain or challenge, the devil finds us in the details. Always.

In my experience, our most powerful and underutilized tool for addressing this darkness is worship.

It’s not gratitude (exclusively). It’s not a magnification of ourselves or a basking in our own light. It isn’t dry or regimented or ritualized.

It’s wanton. It’s hot. It’s a love surge from our heart. It’s the wild meeting of surrender to and jubilant awe of the Divine, often at the exact moment when we’re feeling hopeless or terrified. It’s an acknowledgement that we’re human and our sight isn’t perfect, but the path before us is. Worship is the practice of gathering together words, music, and movement as a offering to the One who called us here. It’s like magic. It works an immediate, profound miracle, both in our spirit and our environment.

It fills our hearts.
It washes us in joy.
It turns our weakness into strength.
It turns our strength into cosmic power.
It rings us out.
It changes our perspective.
It reminds us that we have everything on our side.
It elevates us.
It evokes Divine Authority and Sovereignty.
It takes use to the edge of our comfort and discomfort.
It shifts our state.
It comforts and clarifies.
It allows us to see and feel the wide open channel between us and God.
It shakes loose everything that binds us.
It reminds us what we’re here for and what we’re capable of.
It protects us.
It turns and returns us into temples.