Programs – Page 5 – Karen's New York Love Affair

Mirroring for intention: putting it all together

I’ve been telling you the story of how Ruth and Larry mirrored my intention for my day walk, also known as a medicine walk or contemplative walk. Mirroring for intention is an important part of the vision fast ceremony. This process usually begins months before a participant’s fast, with a statement of intention in the application letter the participant prepares.

Once the guides and participants meet in the place near where the fast will take place, a key part of the preparation in the days preceding the fast is to clarify the participants’ intentions. If there is a group of fasters, they sit in circle together and listen as one by one they tell their stories of why they have come to the desert or mountain to undertake this rite of passage. When there is a solo participant, the guide or guides have the luxury of more time to spend with the faster, helping to clarify what the faster has come to claim.

To help you understand this process, I have been telling the story of a recent trip I took to the California desert. I was apprenticing on the vision fast, and while the fasters were out, the guides and I mirrored each others’ intentions for a solo day walk. I have been delving deeply into the story, so that you can understand the way that this type of work can help a person learn and grow.

Here is a list of the entries I have written about the mirroring process. You might find this helpful to read before turning to the story of the actual medicine walk.

Taking the time to care for the hurt self

I have been describing a process of exploration and healing that occurred on a medicine walk in Eureka Valley. There is one more piece to the puzzle that arose as I explored my intention with Ruth and Larry. I’ve already talked about the defense of anger, and how I was using that to protect my hurt self.

As I described various incidents to Ruth and Larry in which I’d felt hurt, another theme that emerged was time: I felt like people didn’t care about me because they didn’t give me time. They didn’t want to spend time with me, as in the case of the friend who had put me off three times when I wanted to get together with him. And they didn’t give me enough time. This had arisen in a small group meeting with my Diamond Approach group, when the teacher had said I could work for 10 minutes only. I had agreed to the time limit, but it hadn’t been enough time and had led to deep feelings of shame when the time was up and I needed more time but the teacher didn’t let me have the time I needed. And time has often been a sore point in my interactions with friends, when they take up all the time we’re together by talking about themselves, leaving me to feel like I don’t matter. So TIME is an issue, or at least TIME is the way that Being was trying to reveal a truth to me, through the persistent feeling that there is not enough time for me.

Ruth and Larry noticed this theme as I spoke, and drew it to my attention, and this became the final piece of my intention: I am mother and father to myself, and I have the strength and take the time to care for my hurt self. This last bit, taking the time to care for my hurt self, was a crucial piece of the puzzle. For it is I who am responsible for taking the time I need, and asking for the time I need, in my relations with others. But even more importantly, for making this time for self-care in my daily life. It is up to me to value myself enough to attend to my self with curiosity, care, and compassion when I am feeling upset about something. And even when I am not upset about something!

So this was the intention I took out on my walk. I am mother and father to myself, and I have the strength and take the time to care for my hurt self. Next time I will tell you what happened on the walk—how I worked with the intention, and how nature interacted with me to bring healing to my hurt self.

Clarifying intention – caring for the hurt self

I have been writing in the last few postings about my experience working with anger on a medicine walk in nature the last time I was in the desert. A friend from Ireland sent me an email about this topic, and he said something very pertinent about anger: “It really scares people because when you are angry a person becomes very unpredictable, unmanageable for want of a better word, and most people handle interpersonal conflict very badly. They just want to escape from the source of the conflict and anger.” As I cast my mind back over the last five years or so, I can see this has played out in my life repeatedly. When I have expressed anger, most people do what is called “cut off,” responding in such a way that our contact is severed permanently.

Looking out the window at the heaving, wind-tossed waters in the Burrard Inlet, it seems the stormy, helpless frustration I have felt is reflected perfectly in the steely waters. The outer reflects the inner in the mirror of nature.

The most recent loss of friendship occurred in August-September this year, and it was this event that prompted me to renew my efforts to look at how I handle anger while I was in the desert. A friend whom I have known for 20 years, who said he appreciated me and was glad I am in the world, kept putting me off when I asked him to get together with me at the summer retreat. Three times, I approached him to set up a time and he said he couldn’t talk about it then. Several other times I approached him to chat and he fobbed me off on other people. Then he said he was going to warn his friend that I was dangerous!

By the third time I specifically asked him when we were going to get together, and he said he couldn’t talk about it then, I was feeling really hurt. I owed him $11 and change for a domain name he’d registered for me, and that was part of what we were going to talk about. So my brilliant, hurt, and now defensively angry self wrote “Fuck you. Forget the whole goddamn thing” on a $20 bill, and I gave it to him. I admit, I felt some pleasure in expressing my anger in a way that discharged my debt but would cause him embarrassment if he tried to use the money. I saw a little humour in it, too. What I really expected was that he would realize he’d been acting like a jerk, apologize, and make some time to get together. What actually happened was that in the absence of his apology, I later phoned to apologize to him, left a message of apology, and he sent me an email saying he didn’t listen to my message, had blocked me on Skype and email, and didn’t want me to contact him. Cut off.

This made me really question how important my friendship was to him. Not very, I had to conclude. This was a deep shock, and I think it’s better to know the truth. But it was also painful, and it led to this exploration of anger that I’ve been documenting here. The brilliance of that note was to reveal the truth, and I’m still glad I wrote it! My sorrow is that I must have hurt him, and I regret not honouring his innocent, radiant being, which is a much deeper truth than the surface interaction of our egos that I have been describing. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And at this point in my journey, the ego heap is still bigger than the heap of my true nature. Rumi said “Pay Satan heaps of gold for pain!” I am grateful for the learning.

Writing about this story now, I see a little more deeply into the original template for this defense mechanism. As all little girls do, I wanted my father to love me, care for me, and protect me. Unfortunately, my father had an uncontrollable temper and was both physically and verbally abusive. The hurt I experienced as a young child was much more than I could cope with, and the one who I wanted to turn to for comfort and protection was the one who was hurting me. This is an impossible situation, and the young soul finds ways to cope that build lasting impressions in the body and in the behaviour patterns. For example, a defensive way of curving the shoulders inwards, and the defense mechanism of responding to hurt with an angry outburst designed to push the other person away, which I have been exploring here.

What I have deeply longed for is that when I respond to a hurt with anger, the person who is behaving in a way that hurts me would realize how I felt, and turn to me with love, caring, and acceptance. I wanted my friend to hold me and soothe me. When I was a young girl, after my father beat me, I would lay on my bed crying for hours. Sometimes, eventually, he came into my room to soothe me and comfort me. I had forgotten that part of the pattern until now, so this makes a little more sense to me now. After the big storm, sometimes there would be a tenderness. This helps explain why the pattern has been so persistent; occasionally, at the end, there was a pay-off of love after the suffering.

You might be wondering why I am sharing this here. My intention is to help you understand the type of healing that can occur through doing work in nature, like the vision fast or a medicine walk. So I am giving you an example from my own life, and, miraculously, my understanding is deepening through this process of describing it to you.

So, back to the Eureka Valley, October 2009, with my guides Ruth and Larry mirroring my intention for the day walk I was going to go on. I had been talking about the anger, and made the connection about the steps I go through (which I described last time), and how I needed to change the order of events by inserting the step where I care for my hurt self. I forget exactly how it happened, but I’d also been talking a bit about the work I’ve done relating to my inner man (which is also work of the west shield) and Ruth suggested that I need to be both mother and father to my inner child. This was a revolutionary idea! I had never thought of the inner man as a father. I’d always related to him as a lover. But what Ruth suggested made total sense the moment she said it: what I needed to do was be both mother and father to myself! The idea of being father to myself had truly never occurred to me, and I could see how this was what I’d often wanted from the men I’d been in relationship with. I often chose men who were great fathers to their own daughters, in that unconscious way that we all have of trying to work out our unresolved issues through relating to others!

So part of my intention was this: I am mother and father to my hurt self. But this still isn’t the whole story. There was another piece in the mirroring of intention, which I will talk about next time.

Understanding the cycle of anger

As I mentioned last time, when they mirrored my intention for my day walk, Ruth and Larry helped me clarify something about anger. I have long understood that when I have a very angry, charged response to a situation, it is usually because I am feeling hurt about something. The anger is a defense, which for me feels more comfortable than the feeling of hurt. (This is not so for everyone; for some people feeling angry is a very uncomfortable feeling, and they might have a different defense mechanism for helping them not to feel angry.)

So I have learned that anger is the clue that I am feeling hurt. It also provides the strength I need to take care of the hurt, as well as to respond to the outer situation. So I have known this for a long time, but since I don’t like to feel the hurt, I usually still go with the automatic response of the anger, discharging it to try to get rid of the person or situation that hurt me, rather than attending to the hurt. It’s only later that I get around to feeling the hurt, and maybe calm down and talk to the person in a constructive way.

Anger diagram 1

event that hurts me – angry outburst – go away and be alone – feel the hurt – understand what happened – apologize to the person and try to undo the damage of the outburst

Sometimes the final step is expensive, if I actually damaged an object, and sometimes it is not possible to undo the damage and I lose a relationship. It is also interesting to learn over time that the “event that hurts me” is often not as bad as I thought. Due to my own history, I can interpret things inaccurately, feeling hurt when there was objectively no hurt intended. As I described this sequence of events to Ruth and Larry, I could see that I need to make a change in the sequence.

Anger diagram 2

event that hurts me – go away and be alone – feel the hurt – take care of my hurt self – understand what happened – talk to the person if necessary, saying what happened, how I feel, what I need, and what I want from them (this last point describes the four steps of non-violent communication, by the way)

So you can see that the angry outburst is missing from the second diagram (darn!). Instead, I take care of my hurt self. Also the nature of talking to the person at the end is different, since it is not about damage control but about asking for what I need.

So this is part of what emerged with the mirroring process. But there’s more to the story, and I’ll tell you that next time!

A lifetime of anger – breaking the cycle

As I have written previously, the south is the place where we feel our emotions and act on them in an unmediated way. When we mature from childhood into adolescence, moving around the wheel from the south to the west (from summer to fall), we start to be aware of the effects our actions have on others, and gain deeper understanding about why we feel the way we do, and who we really are.

I’d like to illustrate this movement by sharing something of what I have learned working with anger. This has been a long process of discovery, involving years of healing and deepening understanding. My latest trip to the desert to assist at the vision fast brought a new layer of healing, growth, and maturity. So over the next little while I’m going to share with you what I have learned, both because it may be useful in your own inner exploration of anger, and because it illustrates so beautifully how the ceremony of the vision fast and the teaching of the four directions can help us on our inner journey.

Intentions and claiming

When people go on a vision fast, at least in the form of ceremony that we use at The School of Lost Borders, they state the intention of their fast before they start their solo time. Usually the guides will spend some time with each faster, helping them clarify their intention until it is in the form of a sentence or two, beginning with I am a woman… or I am a man… and followed by the qualities the faster is claiming.

During the time in basecamp, Ruth, Larry, and I worked with each other to clarify our intentions for a solo walk that we took while the fasters were out fasting. So when it was my turn, Ruth and Larry listened while I said what I wanted to claim, and they helped me clarify my intention. This was a magical process, because through talking and exploring with them, a clarity and understanding of what I needed to do emerged that was completely unexpected…

As I have mentioned previously, I went to the desert hoping to do some work with my anger. I have lost friends in the past when I expressed my anger, probably because I didn’t do it skillfully and it scared them, or hurt them, and the feeling of fear or hurt was stronger than the feelings of caring for me that they might have had. The fascinating thing about this is that my anger usually has arisen as a defense because I was feeling hurt or afraid because of what the other person had done! So it is perpetuating a cycle of fear or hurt.

But, I also want to remind you that anger also contains passion, aliveness, and creativity. So although expressing anger in an unmediated way (yelling, swearing, throwing things, hitting a rock with a hammer, thrashing around in bed next to your partner, kicking or punching the wall) may have undesired consequences, it also has a hidden treasure that is worth retaining. I feel the excitement of the passion I feel for this treasure as I write, and look forward to continuing this exploration over the next few postings. More to come!

Back from the desert

The School of Lost Borders California Fall Vision Fast was amazing! I was an assistant for the 11 fasters and the two incredible guides, Ruth and Larry. Some people marked their passage into adulthood, and others into elderhood. It was such an honour to witness the courage and vulnerability these fasters showed as they faced the unknown and went to fast alone in the desert.

Base camp with Ruth and Larry was so much fun, with gorgeous weather and very little wind. We were in the Eureka Valley, in foothills surrounding a big open bowl of flat desert floor. I had a few amazing runs there, as well as in the area around Big Pine, where we camped before and after the solo time. A night run as the moon was coming up out of the White and Inyo Mountains was incredible!

I’ll write more next week about the medicine walk I went on, for which Ruth and Larry helped me clarify the intention I brought to the desert, of working on anger. It was such a gift to work with these two guides, and I have a new grounding as a result of it. More to come…

The wheel turns to fall again

Before I leave for California I need to make formal recognition that the wheel of the year has turned once more… another fall is here.

This is the time when the child of summer grows into the self-reflective adolescent. Where the child is pure emotion, the adolescent is more hesitant to act freely, more concerned with what other people might think. And, concerned about the effects of our actions on others.

For me, this is a maturing of steeping the red energy of summer in the black cauldron of self-awareness. What effect does my anger have on others? Does it serve me? Does it really serve the truth of who I am? Lately friendships have been falling away like sequins off a wedding dress. Does being true to who I am mean letting go of these friendships because people don’t appreciate me the way I am? Or am I being loyal to an old self-image that no longer serves me? As I look back over my life, most friendships and romantic relationships have ended with an angry scene. Although it’s true that sometimes we need that angry energy to separate, and sometimes anger is definitely the appropriate response to being treated badly, neglected, or abused, the maturing part of me is beginning to question the way I express the anger.

Sure, it’s fun to let it rip… It can feel very satisfying, especially when someone has behaved in ways that I felt hurt by. I’m thinking of one event in particular that occurred this summer… Sometimes the energy of expressing anger can reveal the hidden truth in a situation. And yet it makes most people uncomfortable, and the loss of a friendship is a high price to pay. My friend Dorrie was the only person I’ve ever met who seemed to love me fully when I was angry; it didn’t phase her. What a gift to have that acceptance.

So this is the exploration I am taking with me into the Owens Valley desert region in Eastern California. What inner exploration are you doing this fall?

Here are some entries from the past about the energies of the West, which is the fall quadrant of the wheel:

The mystery of the West

Falling into the West

The West

Q: Does a bear poop in the woods?

A: Yes, and so can you!

Okay, you’re probably thinking I’ve totally flipped out, if you didn’t already think this after some of my previous entries about mouse turds, including “The mystery of the dead animal in my living room,” and the moving song “Blue turd on my window sill.”

But the fact is, being close to nature means being close to the full cycle of natural processes, which mostly involve birth, eating, eliminating, reproduction, and death. And when you spend time in nature, the signs of the elimination process are all around. Yesterday, when I was out for a run at Monkey Valley, I came across some magnificent signs of bear elimination. Call me crazy if you want, but I love finding bear scat. I found two piles, and one was a lot larger than the other, which might indicate that two bears of different sizes have been in the vicinity. Or maybe it was the same bear, having a big poop and then a little poop after. I noticed that both piles had undigested rose hips in them, which indicates the furry creature has been attracted to the bright red seed pods, which seem remarkably red and vibrant this year.

But what does this have to do with you, and specifically, with you pooping in the woods? One of the questions people who have never been on a vision fast ask is how to handle this basic biological function. Obviously, when you’re out in the wild on your solo, there won’t be a flush toilet, and not even an outhouse. This means you have the wonderful opportunity to experience what your ancestors did. Poop in the woods! Or in the desert, as the case may be…

We like to practice no-trace camping as part of our honouring of the land during the vision fast. This means packing out your TP, and covering the signs of any biological waste you might be leaving behind. So dig a shallow hole, and when you’re finished your elimination process, cover the hole with leaves and dirt. If there are rocks in the area where you are fasting, you can put a rock over the little pile to mark it, so that you know not to dig in that same spot again.

There is an ancient familiarity about squatting outside to perform this everyday function. The position is actually more comfortable for our body than a toilet, though if you’re out of shape it can be a strain on the quadriceps at first. Women out on a fast will get a lot more practice with this than men, learning to squat and pee too, without peeing on clothing or shoes. That’s a practice you will have a chance to master during your fasting time, especially if you drink the recommended amount of water!

A final note about biological processes for women out on a fast. It often happens that women’s cycles shift when out in nature, and your moon time might come while you are on your fast. We recommend bringing the supplies you’ll need in case this does happen. Pack the used supplies out with you, along with your TP. If you’re in bear country, you might want to keep your used supplies in a plastic bag some distance from your sleeping place, and use water and a bandanna or disposable wipes to keep clean. Or moss, if you’re in the woods.

Having your moon time while on a fast can deepen your connection with the sacred in nature, and help you feel part of the natural cycles of nature. Perhaps you will be inspired to create a ceremony to honour your moon time, bleeding directly onto the earth or making an offering of your blood in a ceremonial way.

Being out on the land during the vision fast, attending to our natural biological processes in ways that are more like the way our ancestors did, connects us to the 120,000+ life times of the human race, and helps us know that we are not alone. While our single life is finite, we are connected to a powerful, enduring life force through our human and pre-human gene pool. This is something that pooping in the woods can teach us.

Returning from the retreat: innocence, security, anger, and a good burger

As I mentioned previously, I just returned from the Diamond Approach 10-day summer retreat in California, and I’d like to share some of the learnings from that, because they tie in with the summer part of the wheel. Summer is the time of childhood innocence. In fact, Bill Plotkin writes in Nature and the Human Soul that innocence is one of the gifts children give to the world. And it is the parents’ job to maintain the safety of the home-nest in the early years, to allow this innocence to flourish. Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen. But we all are innocent at the core of our nature. Even George Bush, Hitler, and Charles Manson. Although innocence wasn’t directly the theme of the retreat, I found that when I was working with people, and being a very allowing, clear space of openness for witnessing their work, their innocence is something I kept seeing, over and over. And I also felt in touch with my own innocence. This is part of the radiant preciousness of who we are. I felt it was a gift from the universe to be able to experience this and know it directly, in myself and others.

So when I left the retreat, I was in quite an expansive, open state, after 10 days of working in a deep way with people during the exercises, meditating, and having many satisfying connections with friends that I only get to see once a year. I arrived at the Air Canada security line at San Francisco airport in this open, friendly state. Although the line was quite long, and only one belt was open, and they kept letting people in first class go around the side and to the front of the line, I was in my open state, had four hours before my flight, and didn’t want to get caught up in my usual reactive judgement about this situation. I spoke to the woman behind me, who was from Calgary, and we shared some airport security experiences. When I got close to the front of the line, a man asked if he could cut in. I asked if he was crew, and he was, so I said sure, and we had a nice conversation too. He was from Montreal, and we talked about different cities. It was very pleasant, and I was pleased to be enjoying this potentially frustrating situation.

I guess this is where the universe wanted to test how grounded and connected to being I really was, because suddenly my bag was halted, brought out, and the security guy asked who it belonged to. I said it was mine, and he said there was a liquid in the bag. I had thought my water bottle was empty, but it wasn’t, and that was why it had been flagged. I pulled it out and dumped the water in the bin, and put my bag back through. Then my laptop was halted, and the security guy asked who it belonged to. I admitted it was mine, and a jerk in the line who was late for his flight said “Have you got anything else in your luggage that doesn’t belong there?”

Huh! Snap! I was totally out of my open spacious peaceful place and into a defensive response that came to the fore automatically. I said “It’s not my fault security is so fucking anal.” Luckily for me, they weren’t actually that anal, because they let me go through and didn’t say anything about this statement. But the passenger continued to heckle me as I collected my belongings at the other end of the belt, and I lost it again and said “It’s not my fault you’re late for your flight.” And he said “It’s not my fault you’re a stupid *&%&!” I said “I didn’t call you names and I would appreciate if you don’t call me names.” He called me another name, and then took off down the hallway.

So that’s it, huh? That’s the limit of my capacity to stay open and nonreactive. Less than an hour from arriving at the airport. Altercation. Irritation. Feeling caught up in reactivity, which is very familiar, and feeling hopeless about being a slave to it. Why am I getting triggered so easily, all the time? Here I’ve just finished a 10-day retreat and I’m totally caught up in what some idiot stranger said to me. It was an attack, but I got caught in it. Where is the benefit of the practice? The openness and spaciousness? If you are familiar with the entity known as the superego, you will notice it at work, making the situation even worse by attacking me for not being more equanimous.

But I have learned something after these many years of various practices, so the next part of the story is how I worked with the stew of anger and reactivity I was caught up in. And, no coincidence, anger is also one of the qualities connected with the red of the south part of the wheel. It is a form of the red essential aspect which can be experienced as strength, and the heat, fire, and aliveness of it can help us to protect ourselves and others. It has often motivated me to take action in the world. But in its less purely flowing form it can be felt as irritation, frustration, rage, and so on. Which is one of the things I worked with over and over at the retreat. The movement, like here at the airport, from openness to frustration or rage.

As I walked down the corridor toward my gate, pulling my well-examined luggage behind me, I saw how I get caught in this uncomfortable place all the time. I felt the discomfort of it and the desire to move away from it. It feels so awful to be caught in this reactivity. And it happens to me all the time. This made me wonder what I’m doing to keep getting caught in this. Is this a familiar, comfortable pattern from childhood? (Well, yes.) Is that why it seems to happen over and over? Am I creating it? And I noticed how much I wanted to escape from the discomfort of it. I don’t want to feel this way. I want to control reality so I never have to feel this way. I wished I’d said something even more annihilating to completely shut the stranger up and stop him from making me feel this way. I spent a moment or two trying to think of what that might have been—what I could have said. I noticed again how the feeling was so uncomfortable that I wanted to move away from it. But it was inside me and I couldn’t. So I went to have a pee, and tried to remember to sense my belly center—the Kath meditation—a practice I had been doing for the past ten days (and nine years). As I was sitting on the toilet, sensing my belly, I suddenly flashed on my spiritual teacher, and how she probably doesn’t get caught up in this kind of reactivity.

The feeling was as if I’d done something wrong and the passenger who attacked me had told everyone about it, so I guess a kind of shame. I am normally very together, and follow all the procedures for passing through security correctly, but this time I was still in a somewhat expanded state from the retreat, floating along a bit, and didn’t realize there was still some water in my water bottle. Also I didn’t know I had to take the laptop out of its case. I had already taken it out of the suitcase, and put it in a separate bin, and I thought that was all I had to do.

So the shame I noticed mainly by the reaction to it—defending myself, as if I hadn’t done anything wrong. In my head telling him my IQ was higher than his, because he had called me stupid. But just seeing that my superego was involved didn’t really shift the experience of discomfort and an inner, red irritation that felt very difficult to be with. But as I was sitting on the toilet, I realized that the difficulty was that I was trying to maintain a self-image. My teacher wouldn’t care what her image was—what people thought of her (or so I imagined). But I was feeling so bothered because my self-image of being together and doing things right was challenged.

Seeing this started to bring me more of a sense of relief, inner space. I still noticed some superego activity as I went on to a bar & grill to have some dinner while waiting for the flight. Feeling sensitive and raw, seeing how many times I’d been reactive in the retreat and carried away by anger. But I noticed the table I was given by a window facing the sunshine was very nice, and the food was quite good, and I felt very fortunate to be in this amazingly quiet place in an international airport. Feeling some sense of the surroundings being safe and supportive helped me relax into my true nature, and the awareness of myself as an innocent and precious being. The reactivity dissolved completely and I enjoyed my meal.

Anger is a very potent doorway for learning for me. In this instance, seeing how it was working to maintain a self-image is what allowed the whole experience to shift from the almost unbearable heat and irritation to shame (which the anger was protecting me from feeling) to a sense of inner spaciousness and quiet enjoyment of my veggie burger.

P.S. The exploration I just described is an example of the practice of inquiry—the main practice of the Diamond Approach. Staying with our experience, being curious about it, and letting it unfold. The movement of the unfoldment, when we allow it to just happen, can go anywhere. In this instance, it went to spaciousness and a good burger.

Red hot summer

Summer is here and it’s a hot one. At least in BC and the Pacific Northwestern states. I’ve previously written about the Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters of the wheel of the year, and now it’s time to take a look at summer.

Summer is in the south quarter of the wheel, and it is the time of childhood innocence, compassion, and strength. Red is the colour, and the entry Red wheel rolling gives you an idea of the playfulness of the south. It is the time when growth is lush and bountiful, and we get to kick back and relax, soaking up the warmth of the sun. Life is bursting everywhere, and the aliveness of this is one of the qualities that the south brings us.

Mouse is the animal of the south, and if you imagine things from a mouse’s point of view, life is very simple. We see what is in front of us, at ground level. Details, and the parts of the world that are very concrete and tangible.

Red can be seen in the rushing of the blood, whether through exercise or sensual pursuits, and indeed sexual energy is strong in the south part of the wheel. All of the sensual expressions and experiences of the body. Embodiment is what the south can teach us. Imagine the turning of the wheel from spring to summer as a time to bring your inspiration and spiritual awareness (the gifts of the east) into concrete, embodied form for your people.

Warm summer blessings!