Thursday, January 24th, 2013

My heart started beating a little faster as soon as I saw them.  And at the same time it was as if everything slowed down to this smooth, perfect pace.  That’s how it is when you are in love.  And I am in love with waves…

It had been two years since I had stepped onto that same beach, skin and body warmed by the sun, sunlight flashing in my hair, and waited…watching, looking out and listening, for the moment when the waves would calm enough for me to get into the water without being tumbled onto the rocks by the tide.  They always quiet at some point there, and it happens in cycles.  I knew that because I knew that place well, and had watched, and listened, and opened there before…

During our lifetimes on this planet at this very special era, we have the privilege and the challenge of experiencing some of the most potent transformational energies that the earth has ever known.  While some of them make outward shifts in our personal lives or on a massive scale, in many cases the larger upheaval occurs within us.  That makes these energies deceptively powerful.  Of course, by now we are almost used to getting uprooted, falling apart and together, being torn open and made raw, moving through dark nights of the soul, losing all sight of our former identities or personalities, and sometimes just plain losing our minds (or feeling like we are coming awfully close.)  Almost used to it.  We might be used to it if it didn’t keep intensifying…

I always refer to these energies as waves, and the good news is, like my beloved ocean waves, they move in cycles, and if you can get in touch with those cycles you can learn how to ride the waves, and even how to recover well when they crash you into the rocks…all you need is the ability to feel natural rhythms again, and your intuition.

But perhaps before I go on, as inspiration, I should remind you how good riding waves really feels…

After I wait and watch the waves for a while and find my entry point, I slip into the water which is only gently rolling then.  I move swiftly then past the point where the waves crest so I am ready when the big ones come again.  Once I am behind the place they crest I know I can just wait for the swells.  I only need to keep my eye on them as they arrive, to make sure I let go enough for the biggest ones to lift me, and that I am still behind the curl.  If I get ahead of the crests then the waves would grab me and twist me and throw me down, but I trust them because I have listened, because I trust myself.  I feel at peace because I am so deeply one with their rhythm, and because I have made a lifetime habit of feeling natural rhythms, my own rhythms, and following my intuition.  The waves are the embodiment for me of the throb and pulse of life…the same throb and pulse in my heart and my body.

When the bigger swells finally come they lift me up and carry me…and, like I knew I could as a child, I fly.  It’s pure, orgasmic bliss.  This isn’t just a bliss I feel in the ocean.  This is a bliss I feel a lot.  This is the story of what life is like when you can feel your own pulse again…your own rushing blood and beauty…your own heartbeat strengthened by the pulse of nature and the universe and love.  And if you haven’t felt that pulse in a while you will know it.  Things will feel out of sync, you won’t feel sourced, you will feel separate from your purpose and your connection to love, and you will doubt what is good.  But we are entering an era of joy and connection…that’s what all these transformational waves are here to support, (even if first by helping us destroy the old before welcoming the new by breaking down structures that would not allow in full love…) and what will usher each of us into this era is finding that throb from within again…letting it lead us, and source us, and carry us right into our bliss.

There are many things that come into play in order for us to unite with that inner pulse and be able to move at one with our own true rhythm.  Once, as Priestesses and Priests, and other mystics of countless titles, we knew this pulse.  We were in total harmony with it and our example helped others to also remember natural rhythms and find our own.  We can feel that perfect harmony again, lifted and carried by the waves…

Using the example of my ocean love, the first step is to choose whether you even want to get in the ocean on a particular day or in a particular place.  I would never get in the ocean if it felt truly dangerous.  What this step requires is asking yourself what feels right.  Checking in with your own feelings is an art, something so immediate if left unmitigated, but in our world where we are told not to trust ourselves, it is something we have to carefully make room for and support like a new sprout that needs to be nurtured to reach its blossom.  We have to make the time and space to listen to ourselves.  To get quiet, to reflect, to let everything else move aside for a while.  We need time that is solely ours, with no demands on us, whether we choose to share that time with another, others or alone.  We need this time out as part of our daily lives, and also sometimes may need to take a trip somewhere to totally get away from what we are used to and feel our own energy again in a new way.  If we live in a more urban area we may need to take very specific retreat time to be in nature, whether that means travel or a brisk winter’s night walk on the street under the stars.  It’s all about really noticing the stars.

They’re all around us in life, all the time…

When you’ve made that space you begin to find out what your inner voice is saying, slowly and if you show up for it again and again.  You have to be patient, and committed and open at least enough to listen.  The trust in that voice, in that heartbeat you’ve let become stronger, may also come slowly.  And slowly is just fine, because it’s worth waiting for.  It’s worth building, and having things crumble around…it’s worth learning new languages for and forgetting old ones…it’s worth relearning how to breathe, and how to walk, and how to make words.  It’s worth everything it takes and more.

Then, once you know when it feels right to get in the water, and when it doesn’t…when the moment feels perfect to move into it…that’s when you get the amazing and courageous opportunity to actually act on that knowing.  These are some of the greatest acts of self-love: really asking yourself what feels right, and giving yourself permission to make choices based on it in your life.  It means that after you are in the ocean you watch for the crests and get behind them and then, like your own breathing, you feel the ocean inhale and exhale, you watch and feel and match your own rhythm by paying attention to the energies and how they feel to you, and then you can surrender…then you are lifted and carried, then you are one with your own pulsing heart and that of the loving universe…

There’s another great act of self-love, and that is the one you can experience when once in a while you get thrown down by a wave anyway.  Either you didn’t really feel your knowing clearly before you acted, or you did feel it quite strongly and therefore believe that your knowing has steered you wrong.  The beautiful news is that it cannot steer you wrong.  Even if, as you are getting water up your nose, losing all control, being crashed down onto the earth and scraped along the rocks (we’ve all been there…maybe some of us even since breakfast a couple of times…) there is some reason, some gift we don’t know about yet.  Some hard place within us got broken, or some medicine was called for and released within us that will forever after that moment be accessible to us.  Some bright place opened up in a sky inside of us that we didn’t know was there before we crashed.  So this other great act of self-love is the one that allows us to climb back up off the beach, in our own gentle time, take really, really good self-loving care of ourselves, and trust, even as we also allow and honor our pain as fully as possible, that this was somehow meant to be a part of our experience.

The more we take that time I spoke of that we need in order to be with our own energy and reflect, the more likely we are to also be attuned with or open to the understandings and gifts that come from our wave crashes as well, further strengthening our trust in ourselves and the universe.  And of course there will likely still be days when you want to give up completely…when you have been thrown down so many times you don’t want to get up again.  The best thing we can do in those moments is to let ourselves feel whatever we need to, without pressuring or forcing ourselves to try to feel differently, and to be really gentle with ourselves and try to do anything that we can that feels good…even just a little bit good.  The feelings will pass like a storm in their own time and leave behind rain waters that will refresh everything, right away or in perfect time.  And when it’s just so intense you can’t even try anymore, in any way, and feel like you can barely breathe, focus on that…that you are still breathing.  Don’t worry about doing anything else but that little bit of breathing.  In and out.  Just be with that little wave.

Ultimately you can feel what I did returning back to the waves that day…in love.  In love with yourself and life.  You can feel your heart quicken and slow, and let your intuition guide you to a life that is filled with more joy, aligns you with your self-love, your purpose, your thriving sexuality, your most amazing gifts, the most exquisite relationships and experiences, and all the things your heart desires.  It’s been a long time since earth really felt that way, but I remember when it was that way for everyone, and I know that though the path may be extraordinarily rough sometimes and we don’t know how long it will take to get there, that’s where we are headed again.  And though it may take a long time for the earth to arrive there all together, many of us will be ahead of the wave, and we don’t have to wait until then to enjoy the ride…

Find out what makes your heartbeat quicken…take time away from the pressures in your life to find out what richness is happening in your heart and what it wants to tell you.  Find the situations that make you feel the pulse of life rushing through you and let yourself really feel it, let yourself be led by it, and return to those situations and activities often.  And if the waves throw you down sometimes, don’t let it make you think there is something wrong with you, brave soul.  I admire your courageous heart more than I can say.  I am honored to be on the earth with you right now, and to be out there facing the ocean of soul.  May the stars in your sky twinkle extra brightly tonight, and may the waves guide you ever home.

Love, Jennifer

Want to increase your intuition and have a little help being drawn back to the pulse of your heart?  Join me in my upcoming course:  The Oracle Course: The Essential Course in Intuition and Vision  It starts Monday and there are just a few spots left so jump in now if your heart is called!

Sunday, December 23rd, 2012

We’ve never been here before.  This exact, fresh moment in time.  But we’ve been somewhere very similar.  It was a really, really long time ago.  We were on our way, our whole world, into a huge dark cloud.  We were on our way into what I call in my book, The Oracle Within, “The Great Forgetting.”  Back then the forgetting had already been underway, but at the moment like this one we hit a massive wave of it.  Just like this time, only now we are headed the other way…into what I call “The Great Remembering.”

I know on the Solstice, the date of the great Mayan shift, some of you were disappointed.  Some of you didn’t feel any great new energy descend into your lives or the world.  Some of you were just plain tired that day (I heard that from a lot of people) or found it anti-climactic.  I am writing this post today because I have some information that I think will really help as we go through this change.  After all, I remember the last one, and all the incredible points of shift in between.  I’ve seen cities fall…worlds disappear.  The crucial point I need to make about this time is that all of those things are indeed happening again this time…they are just happening within.

The cities that are falling are the ones you built up around your heart to survive the forgetting.  Even though, for the most part, these crumblings will occur within, it doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes come along with the same potential feelings of trauma and grief.  And it certainly doesn’t mean that we don’t need the same level of support and self-care.  We need it now more than ever.  We are about to bloom like wildfire-roses…we are about to shock the world with our color and our fury…we are about to break open like a million oceans and find out how to finally speak of what’s beneath.  But we are being born into new space so profoundly it’s as if we have to find a new way to breathe…a new way to be, while all around us things look the same.  It’s just that day by day, we’ll notice that it may look the same but it doesn’t feel the same anymore.  This was never going to be an overnight change, but if you get to where the air is clear, you will catch it like a fragrance.  Like the smell of the first flowers in the springtime, you will suddenly find yourself stunned by it one day when you were just walking through the cold winter air to your car.  And you will know it then.  You will know the change is really underway.  It’s one of those things you can only feel now if you venture out on a really quiet night…out in the silent darkness, and get down on the ground and put your ear to the tracks.  Far away you will feel the softest rumble…like the roar of a distant ocean…the train is coming….

And don’t worry.  You can’t miss it.  In fact, you’re here now…that means you already didn’t.

After all we all made this great big date together a long time ago.  All we had to do was show up…and we already did.

So, while we wait for the rest of the shift to take place naturally, and take absolutely intensive-level good care of ourselves, acting with great love and gentleness toward ourselves as we go through the inner shifts, there are a few things that may help us along.  As I felt this portal we’ve just passed through it reminded me so much of that ancient time when we passed through it the other way as I mentioned before, into The Great Forgetting.  It was like one was almost a mirror image of the other.  That’s because each way it was the same kind of shift, just in another direction.  (It will take a long time for us to completely understand why the forgetting needed to happen, and for it to more completely end.)  It is like passing through the other side of an eclipse, or coming back through the looking glass.  These intense shift points have signatures, and these two points just happen to be sisters…twins.  That means a lot of the things that happened then are likely to be mimicked now…we will relive them in order to resolve them, like we do with all unresolved past life material.  We just happen to be doing it with that very specific shift material right now.

Let me give you some examples.  Back then, the temples fell.  They fell inside first.  Inside each person and inside the infrastructure of the people involved…the sisterhood and brotherhood.  As people forgot, they began to turn to false power to fill the void left where they once knew they were love.  It was the great heartache of the worlds when people forgot they were love.  So you may find that certain relationships are shifting now, that you are having new insights into them, or finding out where there are people in your life that are not who they seemed to be, or who are gracefully or not so gracefully bowing out of the picture.  Old group structures, teachers, sisterhood/brotherhoods, may fall away and though you may find yourself flailing around about it for a while, whatever you are truly led to shed now will open up new energy and leave new room for more of your authentic self to flourish and be freed up.

Also, like before, it is good to be aware that this is a time when the veils are thin, and when psychic permeability is at a peak.  That means it is easier than ever to go someplace or have an interaction and pick up on the energies around you without realizing that it isn’t your own.  The simplest cure for this is time on your own doing something you love.  It will clear up for you what is your own energy and what isn’t.  You need time to reflect, and time to nurture yourself.  This psychic permeability can also make us feel sort of “haunted” by old ghosts.  They are simply “guardians at the gate”…they are there because you are stepping into more of your power and those energies are coming up to be cleared.  When they come up we are being challenged to look them in the eye, tell them there is no place for them in our energy field anymore, and walk on across our new threshold of risk and true empowerment beyond them.  We always encounter these guardians at the gate when we are about to take a bold step into more of who we really are.  They come up so we can say goodbye and truly take our place at the banquet table of our lives for the abundant feast we have newly realized is available to us.  It is time to say yes to ourselves, yes to who we are, and everything else be damned.  We have tried it every other way…trying to please or suppress others, trying to get answers and approval outside, and it has only led us to destruction and a world mostly full of lost souls.  The only real answers are within.  The only way we can ever really offer others our gifts is to give them to ourselves first.  We need radical change now, not just empty words to sustain false securities.  It’s a new world and it will be built on our true, raw desires and our willingness to take a chance on them.  Oh yeah…I said it.  I think I’m even gonna say it again…just in case you didn’t really hear it…

It’s a new world and it will be built on our true, raw desires and our willingness to take a chance on them.

Yeah…I know you are probably tired, and maybe scared, and you’ve already been taken apart and put back together so many times that you no longer have an envelope left to push.  You may not know what to believe anymore. That’s fine.  Perfect even.  You can start with just the moment..each moment that comes, and find out what you believe, from the new, fresh place of giving up…of the bottom, of the bare floor.  It’s a start.  That’s all we need.

Forget everything you know about what’s coming.  Forget everything you’ve heard about what the changes are or mean, or what the world will become or won’t.  Forget what you think you know about your future (unless you’ve already fallen in love with it…)  You can even forget this after you read it.  Forget all that and just feel whatever is under your fingertips.  Feel the air move in and out of your lungs.  Ask your heart what it beats for.  You will likely have forgotten why you weren’t going to do the things you really wanted to…”Why was I holding back again?”, you’ll ask yourself, “What was it that I had to lose?”  Like poet Mary Oliver suggests, just consider letting “the warm animal of your body love what it loves.”  And like Anais Nin you will soon realize that for you too “the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud, was greater than the risk it took to bloom.”

And then you might even find yourself getting up off the couch in the nightie-top under overalls you wore all day and busting a little groove to the Justin Timberlake you are listening to while you write a modern-day Oracle prophecy about the coming of the new world…oh wait…that’s me.  I can highly recommend it, though.  (Whatever the equivalent is for you of busting a move in your pjs while rocking the world with your real stuff.)  And really, you know, what goes around does come around (referencing the Justin Timberlake song I am listening to)…and I’ve waited a very, very long time for this coming around.  Finally, so long after our wings were clipped, we are going to be free again.  I saw back then that this time would come, but there were times I had waited so long that I almost thought it never would.  It was, more than I can ever say, worth the wait.

So things are going to look the same for the most part.  But don’t be fooled.  There is something different in the air, and day by day you may ever-so-subtly be able to feel it more.  There will be more and more support for the breaking-wide-open of old paradigms and the welcoming in of new love-based shifts and ways of living and being.  Day by day, though there will still be the harder times where we are going through specific growth periods, we will start to feel less and less like we are swimming against the tide, and more and more like we are being carried.  And when we don’t have to spend so much energy treading water, we are going to realize that we can start to really live again.  Because really living is your best fantasy times a billion.  Really living is something we’ve forgotten how to do…like really feeling…like a lost language.  We knew it when the world began, and in this life when we were first born.  And once we are more and more surrounded by it, we will remember how to speak it again.

It’s the language of the heart, yes.  It is also the same language of the body.  That’s the most important thing we have forgotten (since it was actually systematically wiped out so those with the biggest love-voids could temporarily overpower everyone else)…that the voice of the heart and the body are one.  That spiritual and physical are one.  That holy and sexual are one.  That the senses are the gateway to all knowing, just as much as anything like a chakra or third eye or vision is, and even more so.  When we have the true vision of the body again, there will be nothing that we can’t do.  Hello Sexy, and welcome back.

(Okay I just can’t help it…I’m not even listening to that particular song but it looks like it’s not just Justin Timberlake bringing sexy back!)  So, what do you think Gorgeous…wanna help me bring sexy back?

Because we once all knew just how much the sexual was sacred.  It was the cornerstone of our reverence and our celebration.  It was the glue of all life and connectedness.  It was the symbol and the embodiment of pure love.  We weren’t confused about it at all.  We knew right where home was, whether shared with others or just on our own.  Whether we used our hands or felt it all while walking in the woods.  It was just right there.

It’s time for the body to feel like home again.  It is where everything will finally come together and all that didn’t match up will finally align.  The disjointed places in life will suddenly run smooth and those answers you’ve always looked for will just flow in like water.  It’s where the missing joy emerges.  And then, even in the hard times, it carries you like a sail through strange waters, and holds space with you like a candle in the heavy darkness.  You…bright flame…I am talking to you.  You who might have given up on things ever really being like you dreamed they would or could.  You who almost gave up reinventing yourself, or trying to read the cloudy compass of your desires.  You who is going to remember the way by starlight.

I wouldn’t try to do anything right now.  See if you can just give yourself the space to breathe and be.  To sit, or move, but not have the perfect plan.  Just an open hand, or two, and your gaze on the stars.

I love you.

Love, Jennifer

Get back to the body and your inner knowing with Jennifer in her newly-released courses for 2013:  The Oracle Course: The Essential Course in Intuition and Vision, and The Thriai Nymphs: Lessons from the Bee Priestesses, available all over the world.