Finding Yourself In The Fog
Alchemical Miracles on the Full Moon. Dedicated to the legacy of Connie Bender.
I never knew why I resisted doing this, but I did it today, and I discovered something within myself that I had never seen before.
I also re-discovered something within myself that I had lost, and have long been searching for.
The irony is that the small action that led to this was SO subtle. I had been overlooking it for months.
We often think the solution to feeling lost and hopeless has to be something big and dramatic. It's kind of funny now.
But let's talk about revolution; let's talk about alchemy. I will be including personal and digital images honoring the full moon in Leo, the completion of a six month cycle of, what has been for me, absolute hell; but tremendous transformation.
Some of the images are from sacred circles I have had the privilege to be part of in my past. This is not something I share with many people, but I find it appropriate to share some of it in this format, and on this day.
Most importantly, this post is dedicated to Connie Bender. She was a tremendous teacher and healer to countless souls on this planet, including myself.
Before we kick things off, if you don’t have time for a long read but would benefit from prayers or some prompts to meditate and journal with, scroll down to the bottom to find them.
What had I been resisting?
Smudging my home.
If you don’t know what that means, it means lighting a dried sacred plant, most commonly Sage or Cedar, and moving about your home with the smoke in a clockwise direction, saying prayers of your choice, and clearing the energy.
Great sadness and pain have occurred in this space since I moved in. I felt resistant to smudging and reclaiming with the area spiritually for a host of reasons. I felt disconnected from the spiritual practices and teachings that I have been blessed with for so many years.
Part of it was due to my own “spiritual confusion” of what God was and how to best go about connecting. I went through some traumatic events in my personal life that led me to back off from the “realm of the spirit” entirely.
Some of it was also due to living in an area that is the complete opposite of what I grew up with, because many of the traditions I practice are considered “witch craft” by orthodox christians, and I live in the bible belt. I had so much information from so many different traditions and opinions in my head, all at a very vulnerable time in my life, that it led to overwhelm, overload, and an eventual shut down. I didn’t know what the “right” thing was anymore.
Truth is, that is something only the individual can answer. There is no “right” answer, only what is right for you. The only authority on that matter is your soul.
Yet listening to the voice of your soul can be hard when so much noise is layered on top of it. It takes time to unpack and wade through that to touch the truth within.
It was hard for me to answer that question, because I was not only going through grief that was beyond my explanation (and that I almost entirely kept to myself, so add a thick layer of isolation on top of that), but I couldn’t think clearly. I was in a sea of fog.
There is one other reason why it felt so difficult to do what I always did on new moons, full moons, and any celestial event of significance.
It required me to slow down enough to be in my own body. When you’re in survival mode and your PTSD is triggered, that is the last place you want to be. The other side to that was having to feel the memory of the woman who taught me almost everything I know. Her name was Connie Bender, and she died a few years ago.
I remember three weeks before her death, being in her living room after a large group of us gathered for what I think was the conclusion of a Venus Retrograde ceremony. I remember this night because I looked at her and thought to myself, “She’s gonna die one day. What the hell are we all gonna do without her?” Then three weeks later she was gone. She showed no signs of illness, so I don’t know why I had that thought, it was like I suddenly remembered she was mortal and like the rest of us, she too would die. I later came to find out I was not the only person in that group who had similar thoughts around that time. It was like our subconscious knew it was coming.
Connie was the North Star to SO many people. When we held her celebration of life at a local church, it was standing room only, and there was no room to park for multiple city blocks - this was not due to any other reason other than how many people wanted to show up to pay respects. The amount of lives she touched all over the world is almost unthinkable.
Dear God.. I just realized as I type this, yesterday was the anniversary of her death. Today is February 5th, 2023. Connie died February 4th, of 2019. Wow.
That was Connie inside her beautiful home. I spent some of the most healing, beautiful, painful, hilarious, amazing moments of my life there. Every time I would walk in and she would look at me, she saw ALL of me. She could see right through me, she could see who I was and what I was going through.
And all that she saw, she adored genuinely. To have a person in your life that sees you better than you can even see yourself, and loves you to that degree, is a tremendous blessing.
Had it not been for her teachings, had it not been for the community she built, had it not been for her guidance and the ceremonies held in her home and backyard, wow…. I do not know if I would still be here.
I most definitely would not be the person I am today, but I also don’t know if I would still be alive. Those circles provided more healing and genuine fellowship among women than the recovery community I was (and still am) a part of. It also connected me to the realm of the Spirit in a way I had never experienced before.
So this is why I avoided what grounded me, this is why I avoided lighting the sage or the cedar or the mugwort or the palo santo in my wicker basket on my altar for so long. It was hard when we lost Connie, it happened so suddenly. I struggled to get back into things after she passed.
I feared grief and I feared whatever emotions were buried within myself. If I slowed down to do this practice and really tune in, I knew I’d feel them.
As life moved forward, and as I moved from Oregon to California, then back to Oregon after COVID sent Los Angeles off the rails, then away from the west coast entirely due to vaccine mandates and totalitarian tribalism, I landed in Tennessee.
I stayed true to my Kundalini Yoga practices, but it became harder to align myself with the cosmic rhythms of things, it became harder to do simple things like work with herbs, crystals, sound healing and singing bowls, or taking time to myself to honor the silence and the home within me.
I had been on the run for so long that I no longer had much of a home within myself, so that’s what a great deal of my work has been surrounding these last six months.
The reason I emphasize “six months” is because, well it literally has been six months since shit completely hit the fan for me on an emotional and spiritual level, but also, that is the completion of this Leo lunar cycle if you will. I actually had ZERO idea about this until today. It blew me away.
Allow me to break it down.
What I mean by cycle is a reference to when the last new moon in Leo was. That was at the end of the summer. Now it’s the dead of winter, and we have a full moon in Leo. The new moon was the initiation of a new energetic cycle. Now that it’s full, it is at its culmination, lessons learned, things are ready to be released, things that were once unseen are illuminated, all that jazz.
The timing is eerie. I did not realize all “that shit” popped off around the last Leo new moon. (The Leo new moon is also when I launched my podcast, fun fact.) Then a few days later, WOW. Everything turned upside-down. Everything I viewed as a source of stability and love in my life shattered, and I’ve been trying to rebuild ever since.
The only people that really know what happened don’t even live near me. I didn’t tell anyone what I was going through, I may have alluded to some of it, but nobody knew how badly I was hurting. Truth is, no one actually knows the extent of it, regardless of how near or far they live to me.
I have no idea how the hell I got through that. It wasn’t just the “incident” that took place, but everything that it triggered and compounded. It was the perfect storm. I was truly blown away at how dark things were for so long, I haven’t experienced anything that intense and painful for a long time. What made it so unique was how long it lasted.
It legitimately JUST lifted, and it’s been six months.
It was a death. And the rebirth was not even close to instant. I lived in purgatory while pretending to be a functioning member of society for way too long.
I’ve had to do that before, but wow. I never went through it as alone as I just did. It still weirds me out that I told no one, but there really wasn’t anyone to tell. I only tell people if I think they’ll understand and if I think they’ll care, and having those two things combined in a person is rare.
We live in strange times, and are all consumed (to varying degrees) in our own personal war-zones.
So the fact that I woke up today, I specifically did NOT schedule myself to work because I knew it was a full moon, had a Kundalini Yoga class set up at noon to do in honor of the lunation, and just happened to light some sage beforehand? Interesting.
That was the first time I had lit sage SINCE the new moon in Leo. I remember when it was now, it was the last week in July of 2022. That is how long it has been since I lit a smudge stick. Wow. This is coming from someone where this was part of my daily life, and beyond sacred to me.
People think this is “new age”, but it’s older than any religion that I can think of. The practices that have been taught to me were taught by the most incredible women I have ever met in my life, from different cultures and parts of the world.
These women themselves were Medicine. They played crucial roles in bringing me out of the darkest time of my life. That is why I am so protective over the practices and traditions and beliefs, because so many people have the wrong idea about it, and the ones that are interested often do not approach it with the reverence it deserves.
It’s not a fad, and it’s not new. It’s not some trendy thing to post about on TikTok. It’s something people have been doing for millenia, and it brought me back from the brink of suicide when nothing else could.
One would wonder why in the hell I would have abandoned it for the better part of a year, but I think I touched on that enough. It was avoidance of self, it was avoidance of grief, it was fear of intimacy, it was fear of slowing down, it was fear of feeling.
I should take my own advice more often when I say things like The Medicine Is In The Shadow.
The shadow, in this case, was fear. It was my restlessness, my avoidance. My lack of commitment to myself. My fear of commitment. Emotional avoidance.
So what happened when I lit the sage? I remembered the rest of the tradition beyond the smudging. I remembered what we did at the beginning of every circle. I called in the directions, hoping I could remember all the things we used to say, all the things Connie used to say.
I sat down. I lit candles, I even created a new altar space specific to the energies at hand. This is a deep form of self care that I have been needing for so long.
I have been running on “all gas no breaks” mode for so long that it has led to me getting physically sick and never being able to make a full recovery before I get sick again. It has led to sleepless nights and high levels of agitation on a regular basis, overall exhaustion and a sense of hopelessness that never fully dissipates.
I always feel “so busy” and at the same time “so behind”, and that state of being will wipe you out. Efforts produced from that energy are usually futile.
I thought to smudge my home many times these last few months, because the pain I went through here alone really started to infiltrate the area, and I became uneasy being at home. It didn’t feel safe.
Nowhere did.
I knew doing something like smudging the area would reset that, it always had before. I just avoided it. I “didn’t have the time or energy for it”, or I spiraled into overthinking it and would find a reason to talk myself out of it.
Today? Fuck that.
I just did it.
The rest took care of itself, and wildly.
The kundalini yoga session began after I jotted down a few things in a journal and meditated on some prompts surrounding the energy of this lunation.
That was when things really exploded for me.
Streams of genius flooded my mind, and I began to write them all out. These “streams of genius” are within us all, and honestly I have no idea where they come from. Is it our intuition, is it our higher selves, our soul, or is it the Universe, God? Or…. are all of those things I just mentioned the same thing?
Hard tellin, not knowin.
I sense they may be the same. I know they are connected…. or rather I believe they are connected, but I don’t know anything for sure. And I’m okay with that. Life is supposed to be mysterious.
The thing I mentioned about discovering something within myself that I had never seen before, yeah. That happened.
I’ve been literally killing myself to live lately. And I’ve been searching for a clear thought, an inspiration, a vision, something that just made more sense than all this struggle, all this fog, all this endless fight.
I saw one. I wrote it all down. I am not going to share it just yet, but when the Yogi teaching the class told us to turn our attention to what our aspiration was for our lives, that’s when it all came out.
The answer I had been looking for was in there.
I don’t know how I’ll get there, but it gives me something to hold onto. It gives me a direction to go toward, and a feeling to follow. It gives me something to align with, and something to embody.
It is a North Star.
I guess it is only right that I returned to this practice, and returned to the smell of the smoke that reminds me who I am, the day after the anniversary of Connie’s death, and the Leo full moon.
The smell of sage smoke reminds me of my life, and the life between lives, and it reminds me of my worth as a woman.
That may sound like a “tall order” for the smell of something to be able to do, but it does.
It was THIS that was my “re-discovery” of that part of myself which I had lost, and been searching for. I can’t tell you how long it’s been that I’ve felt like a shell of who I used to be— a ghost. Much longer than the last six months I’ll tell you that.
And the part that I had never seen before? That was the vision that overtook my mind when asked by the Yogi to turn my attention to my deepest aspiration for this life. I had never seen what I saw before. It took a minute to get to it, but once I arrived, whoa.
We all have these truths, these dreams, these visions, this wisdom within us. There are NO exceptions. Everyone has this experience waiting for them.
I share how I got there as it may be helpful to some, but to others, their path may be so wildly different from mine that it might not resonate at all.
I honor it all, because we are NOT clones. We are not cookie cutter NPCs on a conveyor belt who all need to be having the same life experience. That is one of the greatest deceptions, that our lives need to look a certain way.
It’s why people are so miserable when they compare their lives to the external appearances of others, and when they measure it against the narrative shoved down our throat by the machine since we were old enough to interpret language.
I have a few things to share with you that I came across today which I found helpful. But first, a few more pictures.
I’ll share some writing prompts I found helpful and also some stream of consciousness prayers that flooded my head during meditation.
Before I write these down, I will ask whoever reads this and finds value in it to please consider becoming a paid subscriber, as I currently work two jobs and am barely staying afloat as is, because aside from cost of living tripling, I am also funding my debut album, and those projects are extremely expensive.
If there is an energetic exchange to an activity, particularly a financial one, then I am able to give it more of my time. I love writing and being able to share these thoughts with you.
I also want to thank those of you who are paid subscribers, you have no idea how much that means to me. THANK YOU.
Your contributions help me stay afloat, put food in my fridge, and also help me to create this debut album— something I was tasked with when I was given the gift of voice after I got sober. And after Dylan passed away in 2021, a new fire was lit under my ass in regards to it. I’m trying to move as fast as I can with it, I can’t even describe the urgency I feel around it. It’s beyond maddening at times, but a blessing. I need to do this for my souls purpose in this life, and for everyone who has been part of my life in one way or another.
Writing prompts you may feel useful, if you feel the need to go within yourself:
What is getting illuminated when it comes to your private healing journey? What has culminated in this area of your life over the last six months?
When obstacles emerge in your relationships, especially the close ones, what practices help you work through frustration, impatience, and/or self doubt? How are you learning to balance self-assertion with gentleness in your partnerships?
What are you feeling driven to accomplish in your life right now? What keeps you motivated when you encounter unexpected changes?
Where are you holding back and restricting yourself in your life? Is there something you want to do or say that you keep putting off? Is there a project you want to launch that you keep hidden out of self doubt or perfectionism?
What area(s) of your life is/are asking for more prosperity and abundance right now?
A message to whoever is reading:
I love you.
You were not put here to suffer.
You will get through it.
You are meant to be fulfilled in every way.
The idea of unworthiness is one of the greatest lies ever sold.
This is not to fan the flames of entitlement, of course we still need to show up and act with integrity.
But we are not clones on a conveyor belt.
Trust the process.
Your journey doesn’t have to look like theirs.
~
Soothe what is sore.
Rest what is weary.
Run what is restless.
Reveal what is hidden.
Unleash what is restricted.
Call back the parts of yourself that you feel you have lost.
Call back the parts of yourself that you gave away.
Release anything that suffocates.
Breathe life into all that is dormant and depressed.
Give structure and discipline, even a plan, to all that is confused and anxious.
Better yet, give yourself time, time to sit in the silence.
Lose yourself in a song, a mantra, or a vibration.
The answers will come when we have cleared the fog and prepared the runway for landing.
~
Happy Full Moon in Leo.
Fly In Bliss, Connie Bender. We love you and always will.
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