October Newsletter

Hello Beloveds,

Happy Fall. I just returned home late last night from 1 month in Costa Rica. What a blessing to wake up to the changing of the trees this morning! As I write I am looking directly out my window at this tall green beauty changing to burnt orange….ahhhhh my favorite!!!

I initially went to Costa Rica to receive my Reiki Masters Training on the southwestern Pacifica side of the country in a town called Manuel Antonio. The retreat was beautiful and deep and challenging in all the right ways necessary to stretch me into the expansion of my Sovereignty, which was the collective group intention of what we were really up too. 22 women were taking back and claiming all the parts of ourselves we’d given away through people pleasing, making ourselves small for the comfort of others, punishing ourselves for not being “perfect”, not allowing ourselves our own magic and all the ways we’ve withheld our voices, hearts and wombs from the planet out of fear of safety and scrutiny. All the ways we’ve condemned each other and put our pain on another person for fear of being crushed by our own weight. All of it. Reclaimed and owned. It was no small thing and you could feel the tension build throughout the week, to crescendo into a massive release as multiple monkey’s scavenged for food in our home during our Reiki Master attunement process. Yes, we were blessed by monkey’s running about while being attuned into this next chapter of spiritual ascension!

Then I went on to the south Caribbean side into a small beach town called Puerto Viejo, near the Panama border for 3 weeks. Wow. This portion of my trip, which I thought was supposed to be my “vacaciones” was not that. No, Spirit had other things in store, and like I tell many of my clients, we may not get what we want, but we get what we need. This portion of my trip turned into one long healing process. I came to the country with much on my plate. Lots of stress. Lots of overwhelm. Lots of fear. Lots of loss. Lots of unrest. My first full day in PV I went to the beach and I was just barely hanging on by a thread. I went into child’s pose in front of the ocean and sobbed and just let all the fear I had been pushing down to rise up out of my body and I let it take me over. This energy needed to come out, and pretending like it didn’t exist or that I wasn’t bothered by it I could no longer do. I was out of my reiki retreat and I finally felt like I could let go. And let go I did. For many weeks I had a lot of practice in letting go, grieving, breathing into a lot of discomfort and learning how to hold all the dark scary places within myself I see that I’ve put on others. Mostly men and specifically, men I’m in partnership with. 

I “got to” revisit my father wound again and really feel all the ways I didn’t feel met or seen or loved by him, and how much pain that story brings me, and that I don’t have to tell it or think about it that way anymore. The truth is, my father loved me and did the best he could. I like what my friend and Reiki teacher Christy Marsh said, “my relationship with him just isn’t a problem anymore.” Yes, I always have a choice, and I’m choosing to see the blessings my father’s attachment style gave me – which was pretty avoidant and emotionally unavailable – as not a problem and as the perfect medicine I need to be my best self. 

My life needed to become very simple in Viejo. Every day I walked the beach and swam in the ocean and gave my tears to the water. I sobbed on that sand daily and wondered if I would ever come out, if the energy would ever shift and contemplated if I needed to change my entire life. It was one long dark night of the soul. I felt very recluse and guarded and unsafe for many weeks. Walking around feeling like the boogy man was going to jump out and get me, wanting to connect with the locals and other travelers, and whenever anyone else would get close I’d start to feel really awkward, seeming to have lost all social skills and I’d withdraw and continue my isolation. It was difficult to navigate the energies at the time. Feeling like I could really use a shoulder to lean on, and also feeling like that just wasn’t the right thing to do. That I needed to lean on my own shoulders and create a wider container to hold myself. Whew. Uncomfortable stuff, but necessary.

The flip side is that Spirit blessed me with a space and place to be away and do this deep inner work for myself, and ultimately, the planet. I’ll be honest, had I been home with all the distractions of work and a functional cell phone, laptop and internet, I know I wouldn’t have done it to the degree that I did. I got to go away and heal on miles and miles of ongoing ocean and jungle, and get back into latin dancing and activating my Divine Feminine energies of allowing and receiving, and really just being. There was a lot of “being” on this trip. 

Now that I’ve returned home I honestly feeling the most peaceful I have in a very long time. In retrospect I see that I needed to go through the non-peaceful places to return to that peaceful place in my heart that was there underneath the fear and uncertainties all along. That the uncertainties are my creation, no one else’s, and that I’m a conscious creator —— everything in my life I created, and to get more conscious about what I want to create. All the recent adversity Spirit gave me was an opportunity to develop a peaceful place within myself for my own head to rest. Reminding me that the only way out is through and to heal, we must feel, and then pull ourselves out of the suffering and look at the palm trees, remember the good, see the beauty in what life is offering us. The ability to go within and take inventory, then come back out and laugh and talk about it is the way we heal. 

As I look back at this time, I recall spending a great deal laying on that sand underneath the palms and dreaming, dreaming of my new life and allowing my soul to reveal what it wants next. 

Peaceful blessings to all of you dear ones. I hope the changing of the seasons, the shortening of the days, the falling of the leaves is softly bringing you into a place of peace and rest for your heart and soul – regardless of what the outer world is offering. 

All my love,
Lisa