Metatron picture courtesy Taylor Ellwood 2020
9-22-2020 This is the last month I’m working with creativity as an element. When I look back over the last couple years, overall, I’m happy with the work I’ve done and how it changed my relationship with creativity. I think my biggest takeaway though was learned in the last couple months. I need to protect my creativity and I need to protect who and what helps protect my creativity. My creativity is what feeds my soul, but its also my livelihood and to let anything get in the way of that is to disrespect a fundamental part of myself that must be taken care of, so it can do the work its called to do.
9-23-2020 I’ve been processing some emotions the last couple days over recent events and how I feel toward certain people. And it’s helped re-reading The Slight Edge, where the author talks about the power of time and how the real power of time is the gradual changes that occur. They aren’t dramatic or loud, but they happen gradually, and if you apply the slight edge to time in a positive way, you make those changes work for you.
For me that slow gradual work is found in trying to find forgiveness in my heart for myself and other people as I slowly detangle and unwind from the recent drama of life. And its also found in coming to grips with my accountability for my actions and choices. The Slight Edge reminds me that it’s all a matter of time and that these moments will inevitably pass to new ones and what will be found in those moments will in part be informed by the work being done now.
9-24-2020 I found out that a friend of mine had passed on in May. I didn’t realize she’d passed on, so today I did the ritual for the dead and what I felt is she had mostly moved on and was at peace. I feel sad because she’s passed so young…she’s only a year or so younger than me. It reminds me of my own mortality. There are no guarantees. This person passed on while in the full bloom of life, but she will live on in my memories. What is remembered, lives.
9-25-2020 Something I’m working on is pacing myself with my writing. Instead of just trying to write and publish a book each month, I’m recognizing I need to slow down, in order to protect my creativity and take care of myself. So I haven’t been writing every hour of the day so to speak, but when I write its much more focused and I’m happier with the result.
9-26-2020 Taoist meditation today ended up being about a topic relevant to what I’m working through. It was a source of comfort to do the internal work and dissolving around recent events and recognize the shock and other feelings I’m processing and work through them further. I’m taking all this very slow, because its not a matter of when, but a matter of release and peace.
9-28-2020 I started doing the sphere of art again, with one modification. I do it before I do the qi gong, so that the qi gong is folded into the sphere of art work and builds off of it and then I finish with meditation and mediation of the appropriate forces. I’m going to try this approach for a while and see how it does. I think it’ll be a more synchronous experience overall.
9-29-2020 I am an intense, passionate person. I focus that intensity and passion on my creative work, but something I’m working on is being more present with the emotions. I learned early on in life to suppress and focus them differently, but that only works so long. Perhaps its one of the reasons I push myself to such extremes in my practice, writing and other such things. So each day in meditation I’m focusing on a given emotion and being present with it, without necessarily acting on it. It’s a good practice for me. At the same time I recognize that passion and intensity is part of my creative genius, part of what drives me to the work I do and I will never give that up, because it fulfills me. It can be a kind of madness and that is something I need to work with better, but it is also the thrill of discovery and the solving of problems, and those are good things.
10-01-2020 Seeing myself, seeing my weaknesses is hard. It’s so easy to focus on one’s strengths and there is value in doing so, but there is just as much value in seeing one’s weaknesses. At the same time I don’t want to wallow in them…that just becomes self-indulgent in a very unhealthy way. Learn from your weaknesses…and do your best NOT to repeat them, because neither you and more importantly other people deserve to go through the havoc those weaknesses bring up.
10-3-2020 Last night I watched the episode of Outlander where Roger can’t talk and Ian comes back to the homestead. It was a moving episode and the pain those characters went through caused me to reflect on something Kat brought up to me, about how I feel emotions so deeply, yet at times can be so cold. I learned to be cold as a defense mechanism. I grew up in a household where I could not feel emotions or express for how they might be used against me. So I became cold. I learned to repress and redirect emotions. And then I was no longer in that house, but I was do depressed because I’d learned to deaden myself and when I eventually unlocked my emotions and started to feel them it was and is an overwhelming experience. To feel so deeply, to get caught up in a situation and feel the emotion go through you…perhaps its why I prefer even now to interact with different media that provides a way to feel the emotion but also some distance from it. To fully feel something, to encounter it so intimately can be wonderful but also frightening and try as I might, I’ve learned again and again that it’s better for me to find a way to throttle back on the emotions. What does that make me? Damaged goods, toxic beauty? Or just a very fallible person. I could make excuses or labels but maybe it’s just better to acknowledge that as far as I’ve come in some ways, in other ways I still have so far to go.
10-5-2020 I woke up in the middle of the night feeling anxiety and guilt over everything. I feel guilty about the harm I’ve caused everyone in this situation and I wonder if there can be healing. I don’t know. Some of these issues go back 10 years and the anger that is felt has more to do with what happened back then, with now just being a spark that has ignited the smoldering embers. Other issues are fresh…and at least with my partner we’re working through those issues. I can’t do much else about the other people involved, unless they decide to speak with me. And in one case there’s nothing else to be said, but with all of them I feel guilt for the chaos I created and the pain I’ve caused. All I can do is work through this one day at a time on my end and make sure I carry the lessons learned into the rest of my life.
10-7-2020 I keep having moments of realizations that hit home for me. The cats wanting more attention, board game night, and other little things like that, where I realize I wouldn’t have had those things necessarily. What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking, not clearly. And who’s fault is that? My own. No one else. I wasn’t being honest with myself…so I put myself in a situation, where honesty was thrust upon me. I wouldn’t care so much, if it was just me dealing with the consequences, but it isn’t.
10-9-2020 My qi gong practice is coming together, and I figured out a routine that optimizes my day time productivity and creativity. I’ve been using the qi gong to do internal work and dissolving around recent events and to help me work on de-compartmentalizing my emotions. It’s helping me come to a better place and awareness of myself. I’m no longer going to persist in doing habitual defensive mechanisms that no longer work and perhaps never did.
Conversation with my therapist today proved helpful. We discussed the de-compartmentalization work I’m doing and I shared a history of when I learned to compartmentalize my emotions (thanks Dad) and some of the impulsive choices I’ve made because of the compartmentalization. We also talked about how I feel valued and why it’s important I value myself, something I’ve struggled with at times. I feel like I’m on a better path because I’m finally learning to unpack my emotions instead of trying to redirect them or ignore them.
10-10-2020 I’m learning more of Gods Playing in the Clouds Qi Gong this weekend. It’s quite fascinating because I’m seeing ho other qi gong movements have fed into the movement I’m learning now and I have an appreciation for it because I’m seeing where this practice can go, under the right circumstances. It also makes me appreciation why a tiered approach to learning this work is essential if you really want to get it and integrate it into your life.
I learned more about movement 5 as well, especially about it is used to create a sphere with the etheric body, which confirmed my suspicions about the practice and how it could interface with The Sphere of Art. I am looking forward to further work and experimentation along this line of inquiry.
I also learned the basic arm movements of Bua Gua last night and that also has proven to be transformative in terms of how I feel my body and how I move energy. I feel so excited to be learning something and taking my practice deeper.
10-11-2020 The final day of Gods Playing in the Clouds Qi Gong was just as intense as the first day. What I found interesting is that there is a process of creating a sphere in gods. That interests me because when I do Gods in particular I do end up feeling a connection to the Sphere of Art. I think the internal work of Gods could be meshed with the external work of the Sphere of Art. It’s something I’ll slowly explore over time and I’m glad that I have the videos from this weekend to work draw upon, because I think all of that will really help me go deeper with this work.
I’ve been continuing to read Beyond Victim Consciousness. While there are points in the book I don’t agree with, there is a lot that does get me to consider how I think and speak about situations. Am I coming from a place of victim consciousness. Sometimes I am. When I find myself passing judgment on others, instead of recognizing that the root of my unhappiness of whatever is within me…that really makes think carefully that it is important to own my feelings. That isn’t to say though that there can moments of genuine victimhood and I think what this book and some others illustrate is a tendency to try and place everything on a person, instead of considering the nuances of an experience. Yes I should own my thoughts and feelings and recognize what role those play in a situation, but I should also be able to recognize and acknowledge when I have felt traumatized and that it may not have been fully under my control.
10-12-2020 The next chapter of Beyond Victim Consciousness asked what the core belief is that I have about myself that puts me in a place of victim consciousness. I would have to say it a belief that I’m not good enough or maybe worthy enough. When I’m operating from that core belief it becomes very easy to put myself into a place of victimhood. That belief of not being good enough has shown up in every facet of my life and haunted me. But I’m going to change that core belief because it has sabotaged a lot of wonderful things in my life.
10-13-2020 Today I was able to use the techniques from the beyond victim consciousness book to get myself out of a victim mentality and see my own actions in a different light. It helped me claim ownership of them in a way I hadn’t and brought some measure of peace and acceptance as a result.
10-14-2020 Last night during the Taoist meditation section of the Tao space live, the focus was on using meditation to dissolve vibrations of blockages and so I went to my heart, where I felt a blockage I’ve been working through and used what they suggested and it helped a lot, because I began to dissolve the vibration of that blockage and felt some release. I’m going to continue with it, but as occurs with any such dissolution of a blockage, things came up and what came up was a lot of realizations around people I’ve lost over the years. I’ve lost friendships and I really had to face the cost of that lost, and what my role in losing those friendships is. Not surprisingly I ended up dreaming about it quite a bit and then this morning archangel Suvuviel came to me as I was waking up.
“Next week, you are starting work with the elements of Connection and Truth. They go hand in hand, so you’re doing them together. What you’re working through right now is prepatory work. Are you ready to work with those elements. It’s going to be some hard work this coming year. You’ve got a lot to work through.”
I was still as I contemplated what he said. I thought about the last couple of months and everything that happened. I thought about the costs of everything that happened and thought about the people I’ve lost and my role.
“I’m ready. I know it will be hard work. I know working with connection and truth is going to require me to show up with myself and with others, but I also know I need to do this work. I would be doing this no matter what path I took, because this work needs to be done.”
“Good. It will be hard work, but I’ve got your back. You will come out of all of this for the better, because this work, like the Creativity work will continue to help you set the course of your life.”
Am I scared? A bit. The elemental balancing ritual has never been easy work to do, because it requires you to face the areas of your life that require change. But without it my life would have been much more chaotic. It provided me a path forward and continues to do so now.
10-17-2020 The Taoist dissolving work is helping me work through a lot of the internal tensions and emotions I’ve been holding in. I was able to express some things today that I’ve been bottling up for a while and although it was hard, I feel this weight coming off me that’s really good. I’m not going to compartmentalize anymore if I can help it.
10-18-2020 I’m coming to a close with the element of creativity. The last couple months seems like a derail from the element, but I actually think its really relevant. I haven’t felt as creative as I could because of the personal drama I’ve been dealing with, but what it’s all emphasized is how important it is to protect my creativity, as well as my happiness. I will never again make the mistakes I’ve made.
10-20-2020 It feels odd to come to a close with this particular element. When I work with a given element, the way it expresses its energy in my life is never predictable. You can think you know how that energy will show up and then be surprised because it shows up in a different way. I feel like I’ve come to understand my creativity in ways I previously didn’t recognize or appreciate it. At the same time, I see the elements of connection and truth being interwoven into the last couple months, prepping me for at least the next year of work. I think, with some irony, that no matter what path I would have chosen this element would have come to a similar culmination. Regardless, here I am at the end, a bit bloody and bruised, but wiser for all of it.