"SHIPMATE" by @bb_pluto
As we near the portal opened up by the Winter Solstice + the Great Conjunction on December 21, we are coming into the darkest days of a dark, dark year.
In the realms of the seen and the unseen, the light is thin and the air is cold. We will soon find ourselves immersed in that inky, middle-of-the-night place where the edges of what we thought we knew to be solid in the light of day shift and melt into forms we don’t immediately recognize.
Luckily, learning to see in the dark is something we’ve been practicing all year.
Back in January, when I was touting the power of #2020Vision, I couldn’t have imagined what radical + devastating shifts this year would bring.
2020 came for us so hard it launched my lover and I from sweaty, salty sea level in Mexico to 10,000 feet high in the Rocky Mountains, cold and covered in snow. I didn’t see that one coming.
But, there are lessons here in these shadows.
What did the darkness teach you over these past 12 months?
For me, the lesson is this: Less mind. More heart.
These words have become an affirmation for making it through our year of shadows. They are a reminder to delve into deep waters with trust rather than gasping for air at the surface. They are a call to put into action the other kinds of knowing + seeing that have been birthed from all this pandemic pain.
Less mind. More heart.
In the bizarre time-space of pandemic living + quarantine, I’ve had a lot of time to explore and practice new kinds of seeing in the dark, which have led me into other kinds of writing. I started this novel project. I launched this blog, and I’ve begun to feel into my heart space as a source of divine creative inspiration.
What does it feel like to write from my heart instead of from my mind?
How do I access and communicate the deep, old knowing that sits at the very center of my chest -- vibrating and ready to sing?
How do we collectively infuse our creative processes with that tingling, prickling light?
These are some of the questions I’ve been asking myself as I seek the light and explore and express my drive to create. Asking them is part of learning how to embody creative expression as a spiritual process, rather than as an outcomes-based exercise I do for external approval.
As a life-long people pleaser and perfectionist, I’ve been well-trained in creating final products that are primed for external approval. My hyper-fast mind has been a trusty companion in puzzling out what those around me want and need and then altering the rhythms of my life and body to meet those demands.
Writing is no different. It turns out that a PhD is a great way to put these big old brains we have to work satisfying that familiar beast of burden -- an A+ and the rush of approval that comes with it.
Although I’m hesitant to say that all of what I’ve done in my life has been to feel the familiar zing of external approval, I know myself well enough to say that my internal drive to please has certainly shaped the feeling that underlies many of the directions I’ve chosen in life. And I know that acting--and writing-- from a space of people-pleasing often feels restrictive and frantic. In other words, it makes me sweat.
Two years after finishing my dissertation (PEAK BIG BRAIN ENERGY), I’m living happily in my decision not to pursue a traditional academic life that (for me) demands constant, often paranoid productivity focused on writing. As I learn to relax into other forms of creation, I’m beginning to understand that the kind of writing I want to do has to come from a place really different than from where I was “trained” to write.
In order for my creative flow to not only be sustainable, but also transformative, it can’t come pouring forth from my cortisol- and adrenaline fueled nervous system. I don’t want it to come from a place that makes my hands numb and my stomach churn. It’s got to be heart -- focused, channeled, directed, and intentional.
YIKES. What does a heart even feel like?
Over the past year of darkness, I’ve begun to find answers to that question in an unexpected place: The Akashic Records.
If you’ve been following my writing up to this point, you might know that I have a bit of what the philosopher Jacques Derrida calls archive fever: that burning, intoxicating desire to immerse myself in the deep space where collective and individual memories, knowledges, and experiences are stored. Back in my post from October, “Alchemizing Trauma for the Ancestors,” I talked about the radical potential of our bodies as archives.
The Records are kind of like a next-level archive -- they record the energetic imprint of our souls not only in the body we currently inhabit, but across all of the bodies and lives our soul has ever moved through from the beginning of time, and earlier.
According to Linda Howe, one of the key teachers and practitioners of the Akashic Records in the United States:
“the Record is a vibrational archive of every soul and its journey throughout time as human. This dimension is not visible, even to your strong inner eye!”
The Records aren’t a physical place -- they exist in a realm we must access through a kind of intense, channeled focus or meditation. To get to the Records, we can ask for guidance from our Masters, Teachers, and Loved Ones -- those spirit helpers who exist in realms beyond typical human perception but who show up for us regularly, whether we know it or not. With their help, we can open up our Records and read them like a book. Juicy, right!?
My Records were first “opened up” by my therapist back in 2016 on the floor of an office building in Easthampton, Massachusetts. My therapist' first remark was -- “Wow. It feels like a disco party in here!” I loved that -- imagining that the imprint of my soul was visible to my therapist as throbbing bands of colors and light.
Since 2016, my therapist and I periodically work in the Records together to find answers to questions about my healing journey that exceed “rational” ways of processing emotions and experiences. Together we’ve explored the spirit of alcohol within the soul journey of my dad, we’ve connected into the heart-space of my paternal grandmother who died when my dad was 7, and we’ve encountered a guiding figure I like to call “rhino-dino,” who reminds me about the need for humor and levity in my daily life.
This year, just before the pandemic started, my therapist began to teach me how to open and read my own Records. Things started moving fast after that.
I figured out that if I opened my Records and began to write on my novel--the story of Larkin, Betsey, and the Mummy-- I could access a source of creativity and knowledge that’s really different from what I’m used to drawing on. I know without question that the material I generate in these sessions comes from heart-space -- that internal wilderness I can’t think my way into or out.
The only other time I’ve felt that kind of “flow” happen was in the community creative writing groups I’ve been a part of through the Voices from Inside program, which works with folks impacted by incarceration and recovery. As both participant and facilitator in those groups, the short 5-to-7 minute writing spurts based on prompts often felt like turning on a faucet and watching images and sentences pour out that I’d never seen before. Now, I realize that the sacredness of the circle we created each time we gathered had a lot to do with setting the right conditions for writing from the heart.
So what does heart-writing look like?
As I wrap up this post on LESS MIND / MORE HEART, I want to share some notes I took during a session in the Records where I was explicitly asking for guidance in beginning the Larkin + Betsey story. I share it in the spirit of making heart-writing more accessible both for myself and others reading along.
My therapist asked me to present my questions in this session to my own INNER VOICE, so in the text below IV stands for INNER VOICE, or the answers I’m getting back from the questions I pose to the Records.
***
Me: “Inner Voice, am I ok?”
IV: Prickling feelings of excitement across my chest and heart -- different from the stirrings of anxiety there, but helpful reminders that there is plenty to be excited about --- I am more than OK, I am pure potential!
Me: “Inner Voice, am I on the right path?”
IV: Impressions of waves undulating -- a reminder of the ups and downs, that OK has a lot of different ways of looking
Me: “Inner Voice, what do you think of this new project?”
IV: Image of ship crashing / struggling on open waters -- a deep feeling of sadness. There is sadness there. It’s salty and old.
Me: “Inner Voice, what do I need to know about that?”
IV: A feeling or impression of a rope coiling, intertwining, ship’s rope thick and white and frayed w/ knots at the end -- it’s being offered up to me, reminding me of the many lines that are tangled here, giving me something to hold on to -- something to pull on out of the darkness of the pit of my stomach -- some of the entry points for this material will be in my gut and not in my heart -- my heart is maybe what I know or what is immediately available to me, the gut is the unknown place I’m going to -- the rope comes up from down below and out of my throat, ready to be pulled on -- an anchor -- an invitation.
Me: “Inner Voice, are there guides available to me on this journey?”
IV: Immediately, impression of Donald Duck in a sailor suit -- reminding me to be playful, that this doesn’t have to be personally destabilizing -- akin to the rhino dino from our earlier forays into the records -- bringing “levity -- there is a way of being light about this heavy work that I must remember first and foremost
Me: “Inner Voice, are there other guides that can help me?”
IV: A surfacing face of some kind of sea god w/ a barnacle crown -- this person knows what this journey is like, they can guide me and maybe even protect me? They are skilled and experienced -- Offering to take me down, down, down into that small black portal deep below the surface -- a different kind of ocean, a different kind of crossing. A craggy, somewhat familiar face. Is the hair white or dark? Is the person familiar or an archtype? Is this Seaward or Seward? I say yes, I will follow -- where are we going? Down and down, towards that black hole and then into it and then thru it up and up up up to the surface, breaking through on a bright deck of a wooden ship -- this is the place to begin? Is this where it happens?
Me: “Inner Voice, what are my tears about?”
IV: image of a bottle filled w/ sloshing salt water -- I get the sense that these tears are an infinitely old resource -- pouring out the bottomless well of salty water that my ancestors swum in -- these tears -- these HEART tears are a kind of visceral or physical connection to this well that I am drawing from, drinking from, being nourished by -- there is salt water in me, it is always there, and when I know truth it pours out -- manifesting and concretizing the well that is always there inside the behind space. Also, a bottle -- our tears are held in a bottle and maybe we go to the bottle when the tears are not enough -- we try to drink more of that / from that truth but it’s not the right kind of salty water. It’s not enough and it makes us sick instead.
***
I want to keep asking these questions, learning to write from the heart space and not purely from the mind space. It will be key to surviving this work as a whole person. As I write and remember here, I can feel that my toes are not blue. My breathing is a bit deeper. These are all good signs.
XO,
L
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