The human heart is powerful. If you are out and about—let's say at a grocery store—and find yourself feeling anxiety, fear, overwhelm, or distress, you might try Tonglen, an energy practice from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.⁣
⁣
Breathe in whatever you are feeling. These feelings may or may not be yours. Breathe in past any constriction, if that feels right. There is nowhere for it to go but your heart, and your heart is a miraculous warrior, an organ of transmutation. ⁣
⁣
Breathe out love. Breathe out love to the world. Breathe out love to those known to you, and those unknown to you. Breathe out softheartedness, and compassion, and lovingkindness. ⁣
⁣
This practice is radical: it disrupts the ego's self-centeredness, and connects us to each other in breath, suffering, and compassion. It breaks us out of our isolation and powerlessness, into expanded awareness.​

May the holy light of the Mother continue to reveal to us the unshakeable center of our being. 

May love continue to call us in. May we keep our hearts open. 

May we shed the defenses that keep our bodymindsouls from experiencing presence. May we dissolve our patterns of fear. May our bodies become instruments of truth. 

May all parts of us come together to cooperate in the evolution of the soul of the planet, soul of humanity. 

May we be remarkable this decade. 

May our actions reflect our love. May we slip out of the dead skin of apathy. 

May we sip day by day the living essence of courage and live our purpose every day. May our purpose be of benefit to the world. 

May we call wisdom to us and harmony to us whenever need them. May they come. 

May we honor how sensitive we are. May we sing and soothe and touch and love ourselves and each other out of trauma and despair.

May we praise the ancestors. May the ancestors visit us.

May we grow good things in the soil. May we celebrate. May we give ourselves plenty of rest. 

May we look at each other in the eyes and say, "I love you," and mean it. 

May we grow sturdier together, and more responsive together. 

May we find our alignment in nature. May the wild, humming, call the children of the Dark Mother to places where only they can go to bring light. 

Last winter, I offered my first community healing divination ritual for people of color at CIIS. I will be returning to CIIS next week with this ritual. May it once again be meaningful, cleanse, and connect the CIIS community of color with the guidance of the ancestors.

Happy winter solstice, beloveds. I greeted the birth of the sun this morning with some others, even though it was a cloudy and rainy dawn in San Francisco. As we prepare to welcome the changing, growing light amidst ourselves here in the Northern Hemisphere, the time of the year is also asking from us inner wakefulness, inner reflection, and inner preparedness. I'm beginning my own work of taking stock!

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))

When those belonging to disadvantaged and vulnerable groups have an experience of shame (or suppression of voice), expanding the lens of analysis to include power and privilege might reveal that the shame individuals carry as their own is the shame of the powerful and/or the privileged within the system.

Small actions, sacred actions.

During this week of Global Climate Action, we head to Yemaya's altar.

We who are born of the waters make our annual pilgrimage into the sea.

Our activism is to remember who we are, to remember the sacred swirl of energy the circle creates, our very bodies create - are created by. So we may take that swirl outward to our kin, those we see and do not see.

Women are walking, ancient rhythms open bodies, leading the way into a new world, making all that is change possible.

We are relearning our stubbornness. We are flexing our capacity to nurture ourselves.

Kahuna Leilani reminds us that there is no away, nothing we throw away really leaves the planet.

What can we do to change the patterns of unconscious consumption, the ease with which we waste and throw "away"?

Every drop matters. Save the waters, living waters.

She who is the beginning to which everything returns, she who commences and completes every change.

My body is still recovering from a cold. My elemental body is waking up again, filled with cries the unformed star matter earthsky and grief.

This sacred life fills me with awe. That I get to invoke three elements in community, in circle, this past week! Ancestors, Fire, Earth, Water. We are magic, we come alive in nature.

This sacred life has a meaning beyond known meaning. Soul humbles me again, I am rivers of grief, liquid substance that shimmers in a time that is coming as joy.

We are bringing the joy.

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.