So it begins . . .

How and why we must bridge the divide in service of our own liberation

Often we have this image that healing is an ascending path. Climbing a ladder up out of the muck and into the clouds, away from the suffering. But growth is sometimes more of a ladder dropped across a great divide, made into a bridge to make the distance passable.

As humans we yearn for connection. We are not designed to be lone wolves or snow leopards living in remote mountain-top territories away from other members of our Earth tribe. We are built to connect. Heck, our brains are even designed to see faces in what most of us consider to be inanimate objects.

One of my great joys as a healer is working with folks who live on the edges of our over-culture’s main stream of power, queer and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) folks, who have been historically pushed out and down from full access to resources. As my friend Young Jee points out, she is a bridge builder because every space she enters was not made for her. I resonate deeply with this insight and it sheds some light onto my own highly-honed, super powers of connection.

As the only child of a Chinese immigrant mother and a white-ish American father, I understand bridging well. I have seen firsthand how my mother walks through the world under an umbrella of cultural assumptions and projections. Spaces she inhabits were not made for her, and yet to provide for us financially and to share her art professionally, she has had to brave these spaces and find points of connection.

For me, as a multicultural, ambiguously ethnic, sometimes white-passing and extroverted child, I became a bridge builder for her and for me. I was the voice and the shapeshifter that could figure out how to smooth and charm my way through all sorts of potentially uncomfortable situations.

Collage including “Girl with Hawk”, a photo of me at age 7, by artist Howard Seth Miller as part of a Chicago School Series, musings on childhood. When I rediscovered this photo 23 years later, I found it depicted something that felt very true about how my childhood stretched me and the melancholy I felt at the time.

My childhood stretched me. Through divorce and separation, remarriage and countless relocations, through poverty and simultaneous access to resources, I got to see and experience many different tiers on the false pyramid of power. This pyramid has been constructed and re-constructed over countless generations and tells the tale of the hierarchy of human value, as put forth by whoever happened to be in power at the time.

In our modern global society, this pyramid represents white-supremacist, patriarchal, capitalistic, colonial, domination society. There is not a grain of Truth in it as far as the Universe and the Earth Mother are concerned, but it lives inside us all the same and impacts both our inner and outer relationships.

As a healer I encounter this pyramid in many forms and it is my work to dismantle it one brick and one awakening at a time. This false context separates us in the most essential way from what we most desire; connection. It is through Radical Self-Inclusivity of the parts of us that carry the training in this pyramid that we can heal the false stories we carry and find our way back to ourselves and each other. More on that to come. . . .

For a moment, imagine this pyramid. Imagine all the people of the world placed somewhere on the pyramid based on; the economic and social status of their families, the pigment of their skin, the size and shape of their body, their access to resources like education and food, the role they play in society as a vocation, and their personal expression of their gender and how they love. Can you see it?

Now imagine that all these people were only trained to look straight forward and up. They could ONLY see everyone on the same level as them and people higher up towards the tippy top, those with more access to resources and “power”. While looking down is theoretically possible, physically do-able, many folks have been trained to feel intolerable levels of fear and vertigo if they look down, so for the most part they just don’t. Sound familiar?

What this means is that the farther down the pyramid of power you find yourself, the more potential access to insight and perspective you have. And this is why, the prophets and leaders who will guide us into the new era where we find ourselves liberated from these false systems of oppression, will be folks who have found themselves lower on the pyramid. Historically marginalized folks have so much to offer us in these coming times and this is why my healing work increasingly focuses on serving these populations.

We are each like a beautifully unique cell in the organism of collective humanity, which in turn is but one micro-organism within the body of the Earth. As each individual cell, we have a nucleus (I like to think of this as our heart consciousness), a cell membrane (our energetic circuit and protective bubble) and many roaming organelles (we could think of these as the visible and invisible beings that help us function).

We now know that a cell can not protect itself and grow.

This means that if you find yourself feeling threatened by the world you live in, growth requires an extra step in safety making. How do we make safety for ourselves in a world that we keep being told and shown isn’t safe? We have to start with courage and work from the inside out.

In my work, I help my clients heal and grow by adding in connection to their spirit councils, well-ancestors, and the benevolence of Nature and the Universe. Feeling seen, being loved, holding connection to be true and ever-available, is part of the medicine for these times.

We live in a time where the powers that uphold the pyramid seek to deepen our feelings of divide, isolation, and despair. Even the technologies we turn to for connection often make us feel more alone.

This is my invitation to you, dear bridge builders and self-healers, turn inward and make safe by embracing ALL of you. Ask your sense of guidance, your connection to the cosmos, your well-ancestors existing in the glorious realms beyond form, to wrap you in their love so that you can grow beyond the false and broken world you were born into. It is our time to rise!

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This is the first installment of my newest endeavor to use the power of the word to nourish and support you on your journey. Each Full Moon I will share a reflection on the streams of consciousness influencing the planet and what these streams are contributing to us personally and as a collective consciousness.

If you want to travel deeper with me, paid subscribers will be have access to all sorts of extra goodies including a podcast conversation to listen to and a New Moon online gathering to attend where we will deepen our exploration the topic of the MOONth.

Thank you for joining me here for our next adventure across the great divide and back to ourselves and each other.

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