Utterly grateful for the ancestors, for Spirit, for community.

It is amazing what can happen when they come together in ritual.

Thank you for making yesterday's Community Healing Divination Ritual possible, CIIS Office of Diversity and Inclusion! May we ring in a more beautiful world together.

"The event will bring together people of color at CIIS within the container of a healing divination ritual. Divination is an ancient mode of communing with the ancestors and the elemental natural world, and bringing ourselves in harmony with them. Our ancestors steered their lives in partnership with the wisdom of these other worlds, but such non-rational calls to partnership are devalued in colonial modernity. As we continue to decolonize ourselves and our maps of the sacred, we take back our power to walk hand in hand with living ancestral ways and practices. 

During the divination ritual, we will come together in community so we might talk to Spirit and the ancestors about individual and collective resilience and empowerment, healing and transformation." ​

It is my honor to be​ bringing divinations in the Dagara way at Serpent's Kiss Magick Shop & Botanica in Santa Cruz. When I think of magickal teachers, elders, peers of faith, wisdom, power, and integrity on the path, so many of them converge in the community Serpent's Kiss creates. Beginning this Saturday, September 15, I will be there every third Saturday of the month.

​Please schedule your appointment by calling (831) 423 5477! 

((Love, Monica))

To live with an other who is a crystalline part of you.

I am beginning to realize what it means to be initiated to kontomble. (Oh, tricky Spirit!)

You experience the deepest wounds of humanity. You are torn apart, until you find the spark of Spirit within. The wilds of human nature make contact with, and bring form to, all that is holy. You begin to transform reality grids. 

And this is how the river flows through you. 

​Dear tribe,

I've long said that attachment wounds are the invisible earth wounds of our times. Many of us have come to understand that empathy, nurturance, attunement, caring, responsiveness will show us the way into a culture and future of mutuality. 

Trump is now ripping away children from their parents—from their felt-sense of security, safety, and trust in the world. Can we imagine what this is doing to the nervous system of the collective earth body? The shock. The terror. Severance from connection to the Mother—connection to the living web of relationships—in turn affecting the capacity for cooperation with and to be there for others. 

These actions based on domination/dominator values are perpetuating trauma that is yet further perpetuating the domination/dominator paradigm. 

Predatory patriarchy.  

This is beyond sorrowful—beyond the blackest rage possible. 

We have known that this U.S. administration will drag us to the very ends of hell.  
So we must redraw our capacity to create heavens.  

How can we be relationally present to this that is hanging loose, this flapping skinless raggedy wound—this hole in the soul of humanity?

One answer in the face of utter heinousness is to soothe, more than ever before, our nervous system. Become sovereign over it. Our sensitivity becomes our strength, as we learn how to de-alarm ourselves, each other. Take responsibility. 

We will not let this terrorize or terrify us. We will defy and rise above, defy and rise above.  

I want to offer a gesture—collective psychomagic or ritual—by which we may join our wills and offer up protection to the children. Just one candle. Light a speck of light and leave it out on your window sill, as long as it stays lit. Light one after that. Imagine the flame joining with other flames into a great big ring of fire and protecting the children that need protection. 

Let us ask for help, even as we take other steps.

​A few years ago, elder Alwyn Thomas demonstrated an extraordinary feat of speed divinations.

After full days of teaching divination, late into the night he divined for us. He read for more than a dozen of us in succession - each reading surpassing the earlier - incisive, accurate, wise, steeped in intuition intricately connected to the ancestors and to the divine feminine.

Today, in that spirit, I will be taking my divination cloth to La Promenade Café on 38th and Balboa, and offer speed divinations. 10 min, 15 min, or longer combined slots from 7-9pm! Come by and get a reading, come get a cup of tea, come say hello.

I am ...beyond amazed... A friend living in Hazaribagh just posted that his mother left a bowl of kheer out under the harvest full moon to receive "amrit varsha" - very loosely translated as the rain of longevity. Curious and wanting to know more - this is not a ritual I was familiar with - I started watching a youtube video talking about Sharad Purnima (the Hindu name for the harvest moon).  

Less than two minutes in, I had to stop as I remembered... (because sometimes the synchronicities I see in my work with the ancestors and kontomble are so tremendous that my human mind cannot wrap itself around the cooperation, largesse, and grace of the otherworlds)... 

Sunday night, during a divination for a female client in India, I had received and prescribed to her a ritual where she was to offer cooked rice and milk to the upcoming full moon and then partake of these herself. These are the very ingredients that constitute kheer!
 
Well. This was the second incredible synchronicity that occurred during the divination - the first I had already seen transpire on Sunday night and will not repeat here. 

I am wanting to share this second one with you here because even my own mind doubts so often - finds so many wriggleholes through which to doubt the existence of magic - of the layer of coexistence and cofamiliality - and for a while all doubts get humbled when I come across these experiences. We all need to be reminded of magic!   

This is as good a time to announce that I will be beginning Ancestor Writing Circles next month around the full moon. I will send out more details about that soon. In the meantime, in case you are intrigued and/or just know you'd like to be a part of these circles (San Francisco location), please write to me. The ancestors are a-calling... they have "participated" in big, bold ways recently in my life, which is (ahem) a reminder that I can no longer shy away from bold steps myself. Beginning the Ancestor Writing Circles is one. 

Here is to the rain of blessings finding its way into every heart that needs the nectar of comfort, reassurance, belonging - or that needs, merely, the touch of love so it can remember what it is to love again. 

Living--

​It is not always easy to grow an open heart, a deep heart, a true heart—to do it in a way that is organic, authentic. That builds the strong fibers of the inner self, so that the soul grows like a bird and sings—sturdy.

I want this for myself. I want it, because that is my pact with myself.

If the nature of the universe—goddess—our whole selves is love, then surely part of our job in the universe is to be more in love. To grow more unafraid of love, and capable as receivers and transmitters. Aligned, resonant.

There is the knowing, and then we come to the practice of it. The places inside that jump too quickly to walls or judgment or blame for ourselves or others. Triggers, as they rain down, make it all too easy to take to the postures of lack.

Here within our nervous system is an entire story waiting to be retold. How do we move from betrayal and skittishness to a sense of deep intimacy?

"Into me you see"

~ always begins with a desire and willingness to turn our giraffe ears of inquiry, bringing together curiosity and deep listening, to what is at hand.

​I commit to standing my ground, taking a deep soft breath of self-empathy, to look at the mise-en-scene, the inner placement of figures.

To where my jackal guides take me when I don't voice my own needs (because I have convinced myself of my Martyr Sagedom)—as guides are wont to, instigating knowing rebellions against "no-loophole" plans, furthering us on our journeys.

Harmony in our inner/outer worlds depends on our ability to listen and be kind. In that willingness, we find the jewel, the spark of divinity, that only humans encode within. Em-body. This is how we meet our collective destiny.

For we are all flying together.

Which is why, the game is not about transcending our needs but about embracing them. It is about loving them—loving the very humanness that enshrines the possibility of reaching to another, so that the need may become the divine bridge across which we may walk and find ourselves, each other. Crown each other.

What a beautiful game we have chosen to play. Lila.

To share the fullness of ourselves with another requires that instinct to play, and also skills. A willingness to continually upgrade our wayfinding technology as we fall deeper down the rabbit hole. Meet those hardened places within ourselves that want to snag or break our descent, but only: have we willed it--
​

​This is a rite of passage ritual that came through for a sister-friend whose daughter is just completing high school - but I can imagine it being useful for our daughters and youth needing seeing and recognition at any stage. Or indeed, by our inner children needing recognition, in and as a loving act of self-parenting. As often as needed! It is also a good ritual for those co-celebrating their birthdays, with the birthday honorees in the center.

The ritual itself is straightforward (and may include other elements you bring into rituals, such as adornment, drums, songs or chants, altars or tableaux, invocation). Each participant in turn comes forward and speaks what they know to be their gifts and strengths into the circle. If they are shy about this, the community encourages them to take space! To get bigger! To go deeper and wider! 

Then they receive. Becoming the center, they are showered with the attention and seeing and recognition of community. They are feted. 

In fullness, the circle transitions to the next participant. ​

​In the hyperindividualist yet paradoxically homogenizing culture of modernity, many of us carry wounds around our gifts not being fully seen. To speak and claim our gifts and to be seen within the subspace of a nested community can be tremendously healing. It can also resource us for times when such seeing may be particularly lacking: we can, in those moments, draw upon the somatic and energetic remembering of a time when we were held in our knowing within community and celebrated. By imprinting in our brains and hearts these relational moments of being recognized for our deepest, most authentic self-revelations, we can allow them to recharge us when needed. This is medicine for our indigenous selves: the part of us that aches to be vulnerable in community. 

​I see the medicine of community as particularly potent for young women and adolescent girls who are just beginning to grapple with how to embody femininity in a culture whose mainstream is marked by misogyny and sexism. In a culture that teaches women to be in competition with each other. It is not only their being seen and celebrated for their gifts that constitutes the medicine: it is also their seeing and celebrating each other! Setting into motion cycles of reciprocity, of mutuality, of deepening trust. 

I would love to hear from you if you or any youth, women, loved ones in your life meet in ritual trying out this format. Send me a note, send me photographs! Kisses to you and to the fabric of relationality we are reweaving.