Death, Rebirth, and the Healing in Between

Happiness isn't something that's sustainable because it leaves no room for nuance within the human experience. There will always be sadness, anger, loss, grief, pain, fear, uncertainty, discomfort, and hurt because you're human and that's natural to feel those things. In the pursuit of happiness, you push down and suppress discomfort which in turn leads to more pain and more discomfort. In the pursuit of peace however, there is unlimited room for all of your feelings to coexist because the acceptance of what is gives it the space to flow naturally. For you to have a peaceful life, you need to heal by feeling, seeing, hearing, understanding, accepting, grieving, and loving the parts of you that you reject and the parts that are in pain. Change is difficult for everyone, there is always a part that is dying and a part that is being reborn. Healing involves many deaths and rebirths and it is really hard to grieve the loss of what once was or what we wished was. Healing can be a very scary and painful process that is full of challenges. Healing can bring up a lot of old memories and difficult feelings that are really hard to sit with, but it is so worth it when you become the person you've always wanted to be. By not healing and addressing your pain and fears, you end up subconsciously projecting them in all of your relationships (with yourself, other humans, animals, plants, your environment, the earth, with work, your time, substances, spirituality etc) and disrespecting them all. You subconsciously self sabotage yourself from attaining the life you truly desire, you subconsciously hurt yourself and others, and you end up missing out on getting to know a pretty incredible person, you! Your journey always starts with you and it ends with you, you might as well get to know who you are along the way.

Finding What's Natural in the Unnatural

Colonialism thrives under the illusion of disconnection and the belief that we have no power or freedom to choose the life we want. We’re all traumatized because we’re humans raised in an unnatural society. People that don’t fit the rich, white, christian, able bodied, cisgendered heterosexual man group have a harder time healing wounds and having access to the options to choose different in life because society works so hard against them and finding the freedom within that space is incredibly difficult, however it isn’t impossible.

In a society that's built off of chaos and benefits from the pain, fear, imbalance, disconnection, and contraction we experience within our relationships, with ourselves, with other humans, with animals, with plants, with the earth, and with nature, it's really hard to find what's real in a place that's so unnatural, complicated, and superficial. Since we were raised in a society full of illusion, we forget how to love. The biggest part of healing is about decolonizing our relationships to our spiritual practice, to the earth, to nature, to plants, to animals, to each other, and to ourselves to come back to what's real, natural, simple, and profound. There's a lot of power in holding the perspective towards healing, as a remembrance instead of unchartered territory because you go in with more confidence. You haven't lost who you are, you just got buried underneath a lot of pain. Who you really are, your nature, your true power, your love, your abundance, your depth, and your peace is found in the darkness of your being (everything you resist about yourself). Darkness is scary and it is uncomfortable, however darkness isn't bad, it's where the most love, peace, depth, nature, truth, acceptance, flow, ease, simplicity, trust, strength, power, respect, abundance, and honour is found. Wherever the light shines (everything you accept about yourself), there is always a shadow behind it. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. If you spend all of your time in your light and never address your shadow with gentleness, compassion, acceptance, and love, it will never be integrated and you will continue to feel resistance, incomplete, lack, unworthy, superficial, unnatural, complicated, chaotic, imbalanced, disconnected, weak, and fearful. True power lies in vulnerability.

What will always be real is love. Nature and truth is in every single one of us. In order to find what’s natural, simple, profound, and real, we first need to become that within ourselves. For love to exist, it needs to be built off of respect and structure (compassion, acceptance, gentleness, the ability to slow down and observe before reacting, calmness, honesty, vulnerability, effort, teamwork, curiosity, tending to needs, holding boundaries, being self aware, and recognizing that the thing opposing you isn’t bigger or smaller than you but the same as you). From respect and structure comes trust and safety. From trust and safety comes harmony, balance, and peace. From harmony, balance, and peace comes love, unity, surrender, and flow. From love, unity, surrender, and flow comes expansion and growth. This is the only way real love can actually exist, without it is just attachment, I learned this from a famous dog rehabilitator named Ceasar Milan. Society programs us for codependency and attachment because for most of us, our needs for connection, to be accepted, and to feel safe went unmet as children. The need to suppress who you are in order to attach to your caregiver is what causes trauma. Undoing what was so deeply programmed into your being as a child is very difficult and takes a lot of practice and patience but it is possible. In order to connect with something or someone, you need to slow down. When you're running and the thing you're trying to connect with is standing still or walking you cannot connect with it because you're running too fast for it. When it comes to connection there are 3 different energies and mental states you can be in. You can be so focused outwardly that you aren't in your own body for the other person to be able to connect with you. You can be so focused inwardly that you don't reach out to leave room for connection. You can also be in the middle of the two. Connection is found when you can meet someone in the middle (the place of acceptance, trust, surrender, love, and flow). On either extreme, you will always be alone because there is fear and fear disconnects us. To find the middle (connection), it's important to work within both extremes to slowly work your way back to centre (this is true for any wound). When you meet someone in the middle, you trust, leave room for them to show up, you are able to see them and the connection clearly, and you won't be alone anymore. If you don't connect, you cannot heal. Connections can break you, but the right ones will give you the space to rebuild yourself.

Nature is in you, and it's waiting and wanting you to come back home. Plants, animals, and nature will always want and love you, you will never be not enough for them. Plants, animals, and nature see us. They see and understand our actions towards each other, to animals, plants, and the earth because they’re beings that haven’t lost their truth yet. When you’re able to see your own truth, you’re able to see the universal truth of all things, and you’re able to remain open to having telepathy with other beings. All telepathy really is, is the sharing of truth and energy between two beings. All beings, physical or not, communicate telepathically with each other. Telepathy is the most natural, simple, and profound way of communication. Most humans don’t use telepathy because we have suppressed our truth with shame for so long and have forgotten how to connect with everything, but we can always learn. If you weren't afraid of being judged, who would you be? What would you do? What would you want? What would you say?

Choosing Something New

Something my therapist told me is, "You are not what happened to you, you are who you choose to be." The universe (or your higher power) never tests you, it only ever gives you options and gives you the space and freedom to choose something different than what you’re used to. You can never pick wrong. A lot of the time, choosing something that will bring you the most stability, growth, peace, expansion, and love is incredibly scary and hard when you’re so used to chaos. Choosing something new will always be intense, however at a certain point, the fear turns into excitement when you embrace the unknown. In order to grow, you need to be willing to put down and surrender your fears and the limiting beliefs that keep you confined and comfortable to be loved. You cannot be loved if you aren't willing to put your pain down because you won't be letting it in. Loving someone else is letting them love you. There’s no space for growth if you’re in a box, no matter how comfortable you may be, there’s real stable things waiting for you outside of it. It’s a big risk to dive into the unknown, either option you choose, a part of you dies and that’s terrifying. Becoming what's natural is hard without the tools necessary for that, it's like trying to build a house with air. Choosing to heal and rediscover the tools needed to become natural again is a very personal journey and one that cannot be forced. Everyone chooses it at their own time and they do it at their own pace. All you can do is focus on yourself and hold compassion and love in your heart for the people that aren't ready to come with you yet. The journey towards forgiveness is a life-long one that requires a lot of time at each stage to let go and forgive. The first stage is anger and blame. The first stage is a really important stage because that anger is the thing that’s trying to protect you and it’s really important to honour that anger and feel it in a healthy way. The second stage is the grief and understanding. This is where you feel the more vulnerable feelings underneath the anger. This is the place where the deepest transformation happens. It’s the space between death and rebirth. The third stage is acceptance, forgiveness, and freedom. The third stage is where you no longer allow what happened to control you and you become free. You often bounce back and forth between all of the stages with each wound you uncover and dive deeper into. Healing isn’t a linear process, it’s a spiral that’s moving forward, and it’s alright to be compassionate and gentle with yourself when you dip back down. The deeper you dive into your shadows, the longer you’ll have up in the light.

New Age Spirituality and Colonialism

In new age spirituality, colonialism has become the forefront of it. People are stealing closed practices from cultures that aren’t theirs and claiming them as their own. It is important to know about other culture’s traditions to understand them, but when it comes to your own spiritual practice, things that aren’t yours don’t belong there, not only to respect other cultures and their ancestors, but to respect your ancestors as well. As a society, we’ve become incredibly detached from our cultures (especially for white people in Canada and the USA) because when our ancestors came over, they exchanged their culture (truth) for whiteness (illusion) in order to fit in and survive. We’ve forgotten our stories, our practices, our languages, our recipes, our traditions, our art, our poetry, our songs, our joy, our laughter, and our love from our roots. What we do remember however, is just the pain left behind that’s gotten passed down by generation after generation. Our ancestors are more than just pain, and they don’t want us to keep carrying something that isn’t ours anymore. Our ancestors love us. By forgetting our ancestors, we’ve forgotten who we are in tandem to that so we begin searching and yearning for connection and belonging. We found that in other cultures that haven’t lost their connections and love yet.

The only way you can find your way home (back to our roots) is by relearning about your own cultural practices (traditions, languages, folklore, stories, recipes, art, writing, teachings, music, etc.), healing your trauma, doing shadow work, bringing all of the disconnected parts of you back into connection, and relearning how to trust your intuition. Your trauma is the gateway to decolonizing your practice and reconnecting back to nature. When it comes to the signs you receive from your guides and higher power, it’s important to come up with your own meanings for them. When you rely too heavily on what other people tell you it means, you end up missing the actual message your guides are trying to show you because you get too caught up in trying to memorize what you heard instead of trusting your heart. The signs your guides send you are catered specifically to you and what resonates with you specifically and no one else. Doing research online, in books, or magazines is a really great start to understanding something new up to a certain level. Your intuition will take your knowledge to a whole new level all together. Getting to know your intuition isn't really something you can learn through reading, it's something that requires practice.

Being a medium and energy healer is actually really natural for humans to be able to do, we’ve just forgotten how to connect. Some people end up remembering how to connect sooner than others and that’s alright. To learn tarot, be a medium, be an energy healer, be a channeler, be an animal communicator, etc. you don’t actually need to go to retreats or workshops to learn how and you don’t need certification to be good at it either. Mind you, you do learn a lot of good techniques in workshops and retreats, however techniques aren’t the core of the work. The core of the work is the ability to hold a safe space (acceptance) for your discomfort to be able to hold a space for other people’s discomfort too which takes a lot of time. Growth happens in discomfort, when you try to take someone's discomfort away, you're doing them more of a disservice. Once you have the core of the work down, the next part is just about following your intuition and trusting yourself to know what to do, because you already do.

Understanding Animals

Humans Part in Animal Trauma

Humans have not only colonized other humans, but they’ve colonized the earth and animals too. Humans are not the only ones that are subject to human pain, the earth, plants, and animals are as well. Pets and farm animals are the ones that are most susceptible to deep psychological trauma from humans because they are in such close quarters with humans. The same way trauma gets passed from parent to child, it gets passed from human to animal. Wild animals are also susceptible to trauma due to humans destroying their habitats, trapping them, putting them in zoos, poaching, killing babies, killing parents, separating parents and babies, climate change, pollution, over-hunting, overfishing, etc. Domesticated animals are animals that have gotten their boundaries disrespected so heavily by humans that they become submissive to humans. The animals that get surrendered to animal shelters and killed are the animals that fight to be respected again, but they do so in such a way that they over shoot it and attack or become aggressive towards humans. There’s no such thing as a bad animal, the same way there’s no such thing as a bad human, they’re just going through a hard time and are in need of some gentleness, compassion, and patience. You cannot change aggression and instability with more aggression and instability. You need to be in a different energy to show them they have the choice to choose differently. With companion animals, since humans have become unnatural and have taught each other how to disrespect ourselves and each other, we teach that same thing to our animals because we were never taught how to respect another being. Wild animals haven’t lost the ability to respect each other, so when a human comes in and disrespects them and the human doesn’t listen the first time, they attack. If your power wasn’t beaten out of you and stolen, you’d do the same and fight for your life. Our power was taken, so we stole from other humans, the plants, the animals, and the earth. Humans main concern is getting what they want, so they value obedience at all costs and are more than willing to crush other people beneath them to get to the top. The food industry is a great example of this. They violently beat, torture, force feed, forcefully breed, traumatizes, and then kills the animals we eat all without their consent.

Connection

In order to be a spiritual and respectful person, you don’t need to be a vegan. Humans require the consumption of another life to sustain their own and that is never something that’s going to change. You don’t need to attach shame in needing another life to sustain yours. Eating a plant is the equivalent to eating an animal because either way, you’re taking a life that matters in the grand scheme of things. There is a respectful way to take another being’s life for sustenance, whether that be an animal or plant. For humans to be able to hear an animal’s consent, it requires them to tune into their intuition and be respectful. If humans looked at taking the life of a human, animal, or plant like they were important, things would be a lot different. Humans and animals both deserve to have the choice (freedom) on what happens to them (what they put inside of their bodies, whether or not they bring a new life to earth, what’s allowed to touch them, what kind of touch is allowed, how they are to be treated, who’s allowed in their lives, when it’s their time to die, etc.) no one else has the right to choose that for them. Choice is freedom.

If humans paused to see other humans, animals, and plants as beings that are equal to us, the world would be a much more loving, respectful, unified, and safe place for everyone. The only way for us to do that is to heal our trauma and reconnect with one another once again. A great way to show respect to whatever you’re putting in or on your body is by showing gratitude to it (even if you buy it from the grocery store). When you show gratitude for what you’re giving yourself to sustain you, that intention get’s infused into it and you end up giving yourself love in the process by consuming it. When you show acceptance, respect, and gratitude, the pain gets transmuted into love. When you disrespect another, you always disrespect yourself. To respect other humans, plants, animals, your environment, and the earth, you need to start by respecting yourself first by healing your trauma and wounds. You will be unable to respect another if you don’t respect yourself.

Creating Safety for Others

Some Advice from Vivianne the Dog

“You need to feel your feelings around animals and plants. It helps us heal and let go when you heal and let go. When you repress your feelings, that's when we need to be the martyrs for you guys to keep you from getting sick, so we go in to protect you from yourselves. But when you heal and let go, so do we. When you're honest about how you feel we feel the most safe, honoured, and respected around you. When you cry with us we feel deeply respected and honoured because you're taking care of yourself and we don't need to do the job for you. The more you feel yourself, the healthier you become and the healthier that keeps us. You feel peaceful to us when you take accountability for your own pain. We feel like we can exhale and relax when we're in your presence because we know you won't be giving anything to us that isn't ours. Sure there may be moments where you scare us when you're worried about letting us witness your pain. But in those moments, if you take accountability for your pain (accept your pain) and know that you aren't too much for us, we know you'll be letting go of your feelings instead of stuffing them away and giving them to us to deal with. When you take accountability for your feelings and feel worthy of us being there, you actually allow us to be there for you if we want to be there instead of making it our job to be there. You give us the space to be free, to choose what we want. It's the same thing with people. I know you think it's different, most humans do, but it really isn't. It's the same. When you take accountability for your feelings and accept them, it also gives them the space to do the same. When you're yourself, feel worthy, and trust, you don't need someone to be there for you so you give others the chance and opportunity to choose. When you're with us, you can be feeling all the resistance ever and it still won't get passed over to us because we know you're still going to go deal with it yourself so it doesn't affect us. We know your strength, we know your truth, and we know your bravery. You have the courage to be strong and vulnerable with us.”

What Safety Isn't

No animal will trust an unstable leader, but humans will and do because of all of the programming from our society. If you're reactive, impulsive, not listening to others needs or concerns, not providing for others needs, unable to take accountability for your actions or emotions, have no boundaries, are dishonest, controlling, are not a team player, not communicative, dismissive, chasing connection, running from connection, being aggressive, forceful, angry, violent, shameful, inconsistent, manipulative, or domineering in any kind of way (emotionally, physically, verbally, or energetically) no one will trust you. That shows them you're weak, that you will cause them more pain, that you're unstable, that you're unreliable, and that you're untrustworthy. They may do what you want at the moment, but they'll do it with so much fear and shame that it will only fracture your relationship with them further. We all know how to fracture relationships and be disconnected in relationships, so remembering how to connect is really hard for us. When you don't believe in others or trust them (this is true for humans, animals, plants, and anything else outside of you), they feel your doubt and they will do the exact thing you're dreading because that's the strongest belief you hold. Your physical reality follows whichever belief you have that has the strongest energy to it. Believing is seeing, so when you refuse to believe other than what you've been taught, that is all you will ever see. Even if logically you know it isn't real, the more illogical part of you (your emotional body) will still have that belief so you will still react the same way, until you can slow down and hold space for that discomfort. In order to get more, you need to believe that you can, and that you are more than your limiting beliefs.

What Safety Is

When you're vulnerable with plants, animals, and people or anything else outside of you, all you need to do is believe you're enough all the time (because you are!). Plants and animals feel every single one of your thoughts and already know about the context of every single one of your connections because they are able to see the bigger picture more easily than humans are. If humans weren't as afraid of being judged for being seen, they'd be able to do what plants and animals do too. No animal or plant will ever judge you when you're being vulnerable. A great way to learn to trust others is by starting with plants and animals. The only time an animal will ever hurt you is if you're not respecting them, their territory, and their boundaries. Animals always give warning signs before they hurt you. It's crucial to honour the animals, plants, and humans in your life by attuning to them, respecting them, listening to their warning signs, respecting their boundaries, taking care of their needs (physically and emotionally), connecting with them, spending time with them, and trusting them. This is how you show them that you love them. When you respect another, you respect yourself. When you love another, you love yourself. It's important that you're assertive with animals and humans by being calm, peaceful, empathetic, understanding, consistent, respectful, gentle, compassionate, and confident for them. That’s what shows them you’re trustworthy. True power and strength is found in peace, gentleness, vulnerability, acceptance, and love.

Society's Pain Absorbers

Plants, animals, and humans are exceptionally sensitive to energy and emotions. Plants, animals and humans often come into our lives to help us transmute and transform our pain with love. Animals and plants often take on the heavy pain humans don’t let go of which is why they get sick and die so soon when they live with humans. Women, the BIPOC community, the LGBTQ2S+ community, etc. in our society have also taken on a similar absorber role, so they are more likely to suffer from irritable bowel diseases, autoimmune diseases, terminal illnesses, chronic pain, etc. No one has the power to save you from your pain, only you do. When you put the pressure on someone else or something else outside of you to rescue you from your pain, you disempower yourself, disrespect yourself, disrespect others, and stay stagnant in life. If you believe you can do it, you will, because you're the only one that can.

Becoming a Safe Person

It takes a long time and a lot of bravery to become self aware and take compassionate accountability for our actions that may have caused pain to others or ourselves. People who project their pain onto others and hurt others are always suffering from something incredibly deep inside. No one shows you their pain if they don’t feel safe with you to let it out. Our pain always comes up in safe relationships. It’s also important to note that just because someone is in pain, doesn’t mean they are allowed to hurt, abuse, or mistreat you in any kind of way, and that doesn't give you the free pass to do that either. When you look at someone and understand that their inner child is in pain the same way your’s is, it becomes a lot easier to show them compassion, gentleness, understanding, patience, and establish boundaries with them (from a place of acceptance, compassion, and understanding) because you’re able to separate the actions from the person that is doing them. All pain really needs in order to be transmuted, is acceptance, gentleness, and patience. If something is in resistance and something is trying to force it to change, you'll just get more resistance. If something is in resistance and all you do is show it acceptance, there's nothing for it to push against and it releases. It takes a long time to let go of resistance. You don’t need to let go right now. Looking at something and being aware of something is the first step to changing it. If you can’t see it right now, that’s alright, you really don’t need to, it will come up when it’s ready to be seen. You have the space to trust that right now if you want. For you to be safe for someone or something outside of you, it’s crucial to begin practicing that safety within yourself. Once you have that established in yourself, you’re more easily able to recognize which connections outside of you are safe to be in and which ones aren’t. Everything starts from within you and then it expands outwardly.