Hi Friends… how are we doing out there?
On March 5 I wrote about how to avoid the destructive impulse. In that post I talked about natural and unnatural stress cycles, how most of us are well over our ideal allostatic load and ways to rest and release so we can find moments of relief that prevent us from destroying too much in response to prolonged tension.
Yesterday, while meditating, an additional layer of inspiration around the destructive impulse arrived that felt so important I knew I had to share it with you today.
The collective seems to be in a lengthy Tower card moment (that has been going on for years now). I imagine most of us in this space knows what I mean by that - but in case you aren’t a tarot devotee - the Tower card is all about a flash event that suddenly (and forever) changes something we’ve (individually or collectively) built that we thought would stay the same forever.
But, do you recall what card follows the Tower card within traditional tarot decks?
The Star card - a reminder to stay open to higher guidance, hope, renewal and spiritual inspiration. After the fall of the Tower, the Star card tells us that a better future is waiting for us, but we’ve got to look towards it and trust it in order for it to become reality.
The Star card also clues us into the importance of having a sacred purpose; one that has much to do with bringing forth our unique gifts generously to the collective. After all, stars shine for all who care to look up.
Which brings me to the insight from yesterday’s meditation.
In order to avoid the worst effects of the destructive impulse, in the days and weeks ahead, see yourself - whatever changes arise - moving TOWARDS something rather than AWAY.
For instance, instead of running away from the crumbling tower, or being fixated on its decline, we start to look around for something we want to run toward.
This moving towards is way different energy than moving away energy.
It does require stopping for a moment to look up and receive (or generate) the new vision we are going to head for.
This especially takes strength and will power in the current media-in-overdrive geopolitical climate.
There is Tower card evidence all around us.
The men who run the world seem to be attuning to the destructive impulse more and more everyday.
It is all very disturbing, distracting and disheartening.
It is all very much saturated with events that we may want to run away from, or are sickly leading us into internet rabbit holes.
This is obviously a game-changer of a year. Heck, April has been a game-changer of a month, and we are only halfway through.
Which is all the more reason that I want to bring forth the encouragement we all need to stop for a moment, define/download your north star new future vision, and put one foot in front of the other to head towards that future.
Things are changing, some towers have already fallen and still some more may fall.
Which means the world needs us to imagine something better and with all our heart start calling that in and working towards it.
When we activate our inner knowing and start moving towards that something better, we are evolving with the changes happening around us, but we get to keep that Star card energy - which I think is a major superpower at this point.
So that’s the gist today - moving forward towards something rather than moving away from something else.
If you feel like you personal Star card energy needs a boost, definitely give MIRROR or MIRROR 2 a listen (they are both on the April Free Page).
Or, if you are in Los Angeles, join us this Friday at ROAM for a meditation that gives us the felt experience that we are not spiritually alone on this journey - that there are elevated guides and realms we can turn to in times like these to get more expansive visions of what is possible.
Then, armed with that new information, we can set ourselves up each day when we rise - that we are moving towards that new vision, rather than away from whatever might be crumbling in our sphere.
Until next time,
Jess
p.s. there will be no Tuesday or Friday posts NEXT WEEK, as I am taking some time to prepare for some exciting things in May. So, there will be a good post (that I’ll share with everyone, not just the paid people) this Friday 4/19, then the next time you will hear from me will be Tuesday 4/30. Thank you to everyone in this space!!! LOTS OF LOVE TO YOU ALL!!! I’ve got some good things for us to move towards coming soon!
“The supply of information to which we are exposed thanks to modernity is transforming humans from the equable second fellow into the neurotic first one. For the purpose of our discussion, the second fellow only reacts to real information, the first largely to noise. The difference between the two fellows will show us the difference between noise and signal. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore, signal what you need to heed.
Indeed, we have loosely mentioned noise earlier in the book; time to be precise about it. In science, noise is a generalization beyond the actual sound to describe random information that is totally useless for any purpose, and that you need to clean up to make sense of what you are listening to. Consider, for example, elements in an encrypted message that have absolutely no meaning, just randomized letters to confuse the spies, or the hiss you hear on a telephone line that you try to ignore in order to focus on the voice of your interlocutor.
And this personal or intellectual inability to distinguish noise from signal is behind overintervention.
…
In business and economic decision making, reliance on data causes severe side effects – data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity, and the proportion of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed in it. A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities, even in moderate quantities.
…
MEDIA DRIVEN NEUROTICISM
There is so much noise coming from the media’s glorification of the anecdote. Thanks to this, we are living more and more in virtual reality, separated from the real world, a little more every day while realizing it less and less.
…
It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause.”
- Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Antifragile (important book for the Tower card era)
"Now it's April, and the whales have come home. The finbacks and the humpbacks and the rare right whales, arriving along the coast, coming into the bay, sometimes into the harbor, their massive length and weight churning and breaching as though they, like us, know playfulness. He maketh the deep to boil like a pot, he maketh a path to shine after him, said Job, who, I fear, could not know that there is also a reasoning and a gentleness in these mountains of flesh. Once a whale tangled in line came into the harbor with another swimming just alongside, a companion that would not leave the roped animal but lingered, while brave men went out in little boats and were able to cut the entangling line away. The eye of the humpback is like all the darkness and hope and pain one sees in the eye of the elephant, in whose brain, it is avowed by those who know, nothing is ever forgotten. It is an eye deeper than the deepest well."
- Mary Oliver
“The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.”
- Ursula K. LeGuin
“It is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”
- Virginia Woolf
“And when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That is what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.”
- Joanna Macy
"There is no such thing as independent existence. That is an illusion. Only by the interconnection and endless reflection of all things upon each other can life exist. This is the basic message of every spiritual teacher I've studied, and Indra's bejeweled Net symbolizes it beautifully: The One vast Net and the Many living jewels who continually reflect light between one another. The things we living beings do and say, create and emanate, reverberate through the cosmos.”
--Seena B. Frost
“Create your own culture - don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
– Terence McKenna
It's the mystery of the hunt that intrigues me,
That drives us like lemmings, but cautiously -
The search for a bright square cloud - the scent of lemon verbena -
Or to learn rules for the game the sea otters
Play in the surf.
It is these small things - and the secret behind them
That fill the heart.
The pattern, the spirit, the fiery demon
That link them together
And pull their freedom into our senses,
The smell of a shrub, a cloud, the action of animals
- The rising, the exuberance, when the mystery is unveiled.
It is these small things
That when brought into vision become an inferno.
- Michael McClure
"The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away.
I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all."
- Lynda Barry
Thank you for writing this - I really needed to read this message today. Truly a beautiful reminder 💖🙏🏼