I received this Chinese proverb from a man in our spiritual community.  He was enacting what the Sacred Masculine is called to do at this time – to honor and be in service of the Divine Feminine.  My heart sang when I opened his email.  This is the opportunity and the task at hand; to awaken in order to empower.

A crucial part of this time is about waking up to feeling all that we have left ‘unfelt’;  to understand that the emotional body needs to be respected and mined for all it has to offer us.  Emotions are considered part of the feminine realm.  We have been taught by the patriarchy to staunch our emotions, to cut ourselves off from them.  This disrespecting of our feelings has left us dazed and confused, not being able to honor who we truly are and all we have to share with the world.  Emotions are simply energy expressing itself.  Energy in motion.  Cutting ourselves off from our emotions is a huge loss to ourselves and each other.

I can remember too many times in childhood when my feelings were not welcome.  I remember feeling something akin to a garage door slamming inside my psyche each time that message was repeated.  Ultimately I shut down, and turned away from my family of origin looking for where my feelings could be shared.  No surprise I went into the theatre as a youngster, seeking expression of all things ’emotional’.  I yearned for closer family connections.  It was not until my father’s death that my wish finally came true.  My family blossomed into a place where feelings were shared.  What an incredible thing to come from his death.  I actually told him that due to his dying, I was finally able to have the family I so desperately had wanted.  He understood.  He had felt lonely, too.  I realized then that his life was limited by the patriarchy as well.  I had always thought of my father as the representative of the patriarchy.  I had not liked him because of that.  He was not.  His external life was empowered by patrirarchal culture, but his inner life was cut off even more than mine was.  We had more in common than I knew.

We are here to reclaim our voices, our power, our beauty and all of our feelings states.  We intend to wake up and save ourselves.  We intend to wake up and learn to take care of ourselves.  Oxygen mask on our own face first. Learn to love, accept, respect, and trust ourselves and our instincts.

We are here to gather in small circles of light, that are starting to grow larger and larger. This is the infinite moment of NOW to bring ourselves – body, mind, spirit – and our relationships, families, careers, communities,  towns, cities, schools, states, countries and the human species BACK INTO BALANCE.  We are here to learn how to balance the rational and the irrational, the thinking and the feeling, the logical and the intuitive, the masculine and the feminine.

The world needs us to get our healing work done and then inspire others to get their healing work done.  An important part of the work is to acknowledge and to allow our emotions, especially what we have been taught are the ‘ugly’ emotions; anger, jealousy, resentment, bitterness, greed.  Our bodies are like powder kegs, filled with toxic energy that we have ‘stashed away’ being told to ‘keep it to yourself’, ‘if you can’t say something nice, don’t say something at all’, ‘put a smile on your face or go to your room’, ‘just get over it’, ‘children should be seen and not heard’, etc. etc.

We need to reveal it, feel it and then heal it – whatever it is, whatever is out of alignment with love and total forgiveness.  These parts of ourselves, the bits and pieces that are still smarting from things that happened long ago are not gone.  We are not ‘over it’ as we would like to believe.  Anything that has been left unexamined, unattended and unprocessed is still stuck in our gut.  And it’s rotting away in there.  Anything we have been forced to swallow and yet never accepted is buried alive inside of us; dormant but not dead.  These parts of ourselves are living in the shadows, creating disturbances on deeply unconscious levels.  Toxic emotions locked deep inside of us can create dis-ease on a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, financial,  or sexual level.

We need access to all of our emotions, especially the anger so we can tap into the power of the energy to make positive change, to heal.  I love the Peruvian cosmology because it perceives of anything that is not love and acceptance simply as ‘heavy energy’.  Andean Shamanism perceives of all the energy in our dual Universe as either heavy or light.  They do not judge it as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.  This assists us in stepping away from creating or increasing guilt, shame, exclusivity, exclusion, isolation, righteous judgement, and separation.  We all suffer from heavy energy; everyone of us.  In the Andean cosmology it is said that only humans create ‘hucha’; heavy energy.  Who of our species is immune to being human!?  Not one.  A crucial part of our humanness is our emotions and our capacity to share them with others.  Feeling is a gift from Creator that we have been taught to squelch for fear of being judged as ‘weak’, ‘oversensitive’, ‘too emotional’, ‘hysterical’, ‘irrational’, ‘acting like a girl’.

It takes a huge investment of our energy to keep our heavy emotions at bay, covering them up with false facades of ‘I’m fine-ness.”  Anger is often an accurate indicator something or someone has trespassed or we are not in respect of ourselves.  Anger can be an important sign on the road of life, inspiring us to slow down, stop and take a look at what is happening.  Those famous ten deep breaths, that can be so challenging to take when anger has torqued our energy bodies, were one of our ancestors ways of managing, understanding and ultimately leading to the relief of the effect of these heavy energies.

Anger can be a key.  We do not want to ‘indulge’ our anger by acting it out on anyone, blasting the energy at a living being. We set our intention and pray to become aware of where it lives within us.  A beautiful and powerful intention for us to set is to ‘detonate’ it safely in a safe and sacred space – to express it in healthy ways, to explore it with curiosity and wonder; to honor it.  It is through processing the energy that we digest it fully, allowing it to flow through us completely, and not make us sick or tired or disempowered anymore.  To put it inelegantly and accurately – it is learning to swallow whatever life puts on our plate; digest it fully in order to take all the nutrients from it, and then shit it into the ground in order to be available to take the next bite that life has to offer us!

This is why these small circles of light are so crucial to these times.  We need to gather to help each other unlock and support the expression of our trapped, untapped and toxic energy.  There is power there!  Power we need.  Power we can use to empower love in the world.  In Current Shamanism, we understand that current circumstances and current symptoms are simply keys to unlocking the past that is calling out for healing, acceptance and love.

It’s okay to feel anger. It’s great! It is a crucial part of our recovery. Get help in this if you need it. Reach out to qualified healers, therapists, whoever can help you get to this ‘land mine’ of energy within you.  I invite you to perceive of this land mine as pure gold so that you are encouraged to move toward it and detonate it.  Understanding its precious value to you will increase your willingness to tolerate the pain that must come up as we are healing.  Stashed, repressed, suppressed emotions hold so much power!  Learn how to track them and transform them into the fuel for powerful and positive change in your life!

I love you. We are all together in this. We can do it.

NOW is the time.

Wake up.  Stand up. Speak up. Show up. Grow up.

Bless us all.

Your sister in the service of the Divine Feminine, IIOI.