Scavenge + Starlight

Trouble doesn't have to be terrible.  Events and situations can just unfold.  The universe is supportive and wants the best for you.  You don't need to bring story to what's happening, and you definitely don't need add worry to these equations. My mother was a worrier.  Everything, all the time.  I remember consciously choosing not to be a worrier like her when I was a teenager and I thought there could be another way.  I could see the pain it caused her, how she couldn't put it down, and I thought, terrible things happen in life, and there's no way this is helpful to avoiding them. She felt the worrying made her safe, in control, vigilant.  It was exhausting to watch, and exhausting to be raised in.   Of course, when my own daughter was born and parenting began, my own childhood rearing patterns emerged.  I did my best to pick and choose and release ill-serving habits that were deeply ingrained, but it was messy, and it wa...

There are times when an energy brews up inside of me and launches an action, from suggestion to execution, faster than I can pause and consider if it's actually an action I want to take.  These times are rare but they are startling, primarily because it's a flavor of energy I do my best to eliminate within me.  It's destructive and volatile, and when it does leap into movement, I can only watch suggestion and execution roll out of me, like a thunderclap.   It's in this watching position that I learn a lot about how far I've come, how much I've been able to use yoga and meditation to still myself into pieces, like frames in a movie. Outside of me, regular seconds occur; within, each second feels tripled, leading to lots of time to catch errant vibrations I don't want to release into my world, attitudes I might want to change before they're expressed.  Observing myself in finer and finer details, cause-effect, action-reaction -- this has given me t...

The biggest problem I find with most new age healers is the lack of humility, self-awareness, and self-care.  They learn a modality or two, begin treating people, have success (because modalities work on their own) and soon begin to drop their own self-care practices, begin to view clients out of ego-space instead of heart-space, and forget they are humans too, with still unhealed parts that need acknowledgment and tending, no matter how many modalities, certificates or courses they may accumulate. For my clients who are working in the healing professions, I do my best to have them understand that each client who comes to see them for help are actually also showing up to help them heal an unseen part of themselves.  Some clients don't like to know that; they don't want to see the parts of themselves in their clients that they are working to heal.  I work with my clients to have them understand this isn't a terrible thing, working on people who bring you your hidden ...

My notebooks carry tidbits of wisdom around that I use as tarot cards or insight channels when I feel I need something but I'm not sure what.  Honoring the wisdom when it comes to you --- whether it comes from someone else, non-reality, a book, dreamworld, life in general, yourself --- is an important step in integrating it into your mainframe, your central way of being. One way I honor the wisdom is by writing it down in the notebook I am always carrying around.  This is my way of acknowledging the specialness of the information. The next way I honor the wisdom is by transferring that jotted note down into my permanent notebooks.  This is the way I appreciate the information given to me on a deeper level.  The next way I honor the wisdom is by creating these cheat sheets (the visual above), so I can share and move the information into the world.  This is the way I assimilate the information into my greater consciousness.  If I share it, I've bee...

I have 2.25 notebooks filled with well living cheat notes, everything from what something feels like energetically to reminders on mind and ego.  Whenever I heard or read something that was "new" to me, or clarified something I didn't know I was confused about, I jotted it down.  Apparently, that's over 200 pages of things. I find most people I know hear and learn things like I do but they don't seem to keep tabs on it.  It's experienced, and then allowed to slip away.  I like my nerdy little well living books; whenever I can feel something brewing within (like after I've just woken up) I can grab one, flip to a page, point to a section and there it will be, a path to lead me to the issue brewing within.  My own personalized tarot.  Or I can flip to a page, point, and find a topic to write about.  Very nerdy and very handy. Why am I sharing this?  Living well seems to be a system, not a happenstance.  I wish I knew this as deeply as I...

If there's one thing I try to tune my clients into is the immense power they have in averting karmically seeded catastrophes in their life if only they pay attention to themselves across the quadrants of being.  For Anishnaabeg peoples (of which I am one: Nipissing), the quadrants of being are mental, emotional, physical, spiritual.  In sessions with clients, I usually keep them focused on Body-Mind-Spirit; three seem to be as nuanced as some clients can get.  They just don't know themselves in an intimate way. People aren't really taught how to tune into their quadrants, and when they begin to realize that there are quadrants that have different "voices" and ways of being, that's usually as far as they take it.  The knowledge on how to go deeper with this is "lost" to them.  And they don't seem to know hearing these quadrants' wishes is a conversation, not a demand list.  They don't know it's okay, even ideal, to hear it all, con...

A lot of my clients struggle with the concepts of systemizing healthy-for-them habits + non-succeeding.  They expect to create a system of habits and be extraordinary about it.  I often see them weeks or months later with their "I meant to...", "I had been..." and a big pile of self-loathing dragging behind them.  They've wasted time coming to terms with non-succeeding.  I try to get them to realize every day is a new beginning, every week is a new start, every month the fresh chance to try again.   They don't seem to believe me. The self-loathing pile is unnecessary.  It's story, and a bad one.   At the end of e ach week I answer questions I have on a sticky note in my agenda: What went well? What went "wrong"? What can I do differently? I reflect on the week and the questions and then move the sticky forward in my agenda book. And I try to be a little bit better the next week.   I just try.  I also have notes everywh...