School of Hard Dharma
“Remember: despite how open, peaceful, and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you, as deeply as they’ve met themselves” (Matt Khan). And that includes yourself, too. Our final call has come to pass. Depending on what you’re doing or waiting for, a month can seem an eternity or like you went to the bathroom, came out, and the month is gone. I know for myself, I am incredibly impatient and the things that I want to never end, seem to sometimes end the quickest. Time often feels illusive and makes less sense than the world sometimes. No wonder we are always seeking ways to pause it, manipulate it, or get more of it. But that’s enough about endings—let’s talk about how we keep our momentum to our true north.
In a voxer share, Denise mentions the concept of Dharma and what it means to live out and cultivate one’s own dharma. What does that look like? Dharma can mean different things in different cultures but in a simple definition: it is our “right way of living.” That path that we lay out with our own values aiming to do right and live a more virtuous path. So many of us have expressed seeking a path that “feels right” or where we can “do the most right,” how we can keep getting closer to what feels warm and farther from what causes us harm. I argue that most of us are already there. In a non-righteous way, trying to find the way in which you can do best for yourself and those around you is an admirable path full of frustration and heart- breaking labor. I mention this because all of us have expressed the ways in which our vulnerabilities make us beautiful but also makes us question ourselves or whether or not we’re doing the “right” thing. I think it’s easy to slip into the conditioned mindset that in some way, our lives are pre-determined and we can’t control external forces forcing us one way or another. The keyword here being “force.” Mawu, the creatrix, created what she thought was beautiful. What she needed to feel full, complete, connected to earth, connected to the things around her that she created. We then must ask, how are we connected to the things we’ve created? Our relationships, our lives, our finances, our idea of love, everything we cultivate in our lives, we have created for ourselves in some way or another. What this group has created in me was also a collaborative project. We created the dynamic we wanted, we created the depth of connection (no matter how deep or how surface-y) but it was a collaboration with our sisters and we created a world together. That was our dharma for our sisterhood.
We’ve mentioned chakras a few times and I came across something the other day that I wanted to include as I found it really helpful in determining where my blockages were coming from. As much as we’ve touched on the positive outcomes, we’ve also discussed what is still holding us back from fully emerging in the areas of our lives we feel the most stuck. What I loved about this group the most was that we don’t just focus on the positive. I don’t think it’s helpful or healthy to only focus on one aspect of something. We must understand what is positive just as much as what is not. How can we cultivate growth if we don’t know what we’re growing away from? It was recently brought to my attention a correlation between the development of Chakras and our own human development and maybe where those developments have been stunted by trauma but we are unaware. Just like intuition, and a wonderful point Britania brought up in a comment on a previous blog, is that perhaps intuition is not “the drop of bad new you already knew” as I had described it—but instead a dismissing of what we don’t want to look at. MIND-FUCKING-BLOWN right?! It seems so simple, and it’s often the simple things that elude us. We know shit. Do we want to look at it? HELL NO. That shit is painful. It means it’s real. It means we have to do something about it and that can feel paralyzing.
It’s really nice when people put things into tables for you so you can visually see where the hardship began for you. I present this as a informative and exploratory visual and not as an expert in anything of this nature. As a woman, a human being wounded, I found this helpful to pinpoint at what points these chakras have been compromised so that I may give love there. I know this post is a lot longer than previous but I felt like the last one had to be a banger! As we finished our last call, there was so much love and thankfulness within it. Thankful that we were able to connect with different women, occupying different spaces, and still finding so much commonality. How are you the creatrix of your world? Just like Blue and her bulbs she planted for all of us ( thank you for the beautiful gesture of literal growth) what are you planting in this time of death to see it blossom later? How are you cultivating your strength and power? How are you growing your capacity to love and still recognizing the dark qualities? What are you protective of? How do your self-destructive habits keep you from your light, your power? We created this together. I would like to take this space to honor and thank Rae Irelan for being the creatrix of her world and Global Goddess because she brought us together to create something empowering in our world. I am thankful for all of you. For the attention and time, you gave to give yourself something special to remember and to carry on if it is within you to do so. The hardest part of building something new is the foundation—what do we want it to look like? What’s going to be the foundation of this new, bright, shiny thing we are molding with our own hands? One thing I want to touch on that was the focus of our last week was our cycle with the moon. Do you know yours? How are we aligning ourselves with our own shift of the moon? As women, we embody something specific to our bodies— the cycle of our menstruation that controls so much more than we realize. Our bodies do this very special thing— I also want to acknowledge that those that identify as a woman who do not biologically have a period cycle, that this still pertains to how it feels for you. Ups and downs do not know gender, race, sexuality, or political affiliation. We are all affected by the cycles of the moon. As we finish this journey, we realize it has only began. I realize I am having resistance to ending this but that is because I am perceiving of this as an ending. It is not. It is a continuum that I must commit myself to— and I intend to. Thank you to all that have carried me through this journey. Thank and love yourselves for allowing a month of internal reflection, relationship building, and excavating those wounds that keep breaking open so that you will love them. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”—Leonard Cohenexcavating those wounds that keep breaking open so that you will love them. “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”—Leonard Cohen). So, here is this:
