you can choose new armor

and tools, and adornments...

I knew 2025 was going to be a year of rapid-fire change, a de-stabilizing 365-day shift from the old reality into the future reality. Meditating at the end of 2024, I felt the essence of the year 2025 as a hand having to let go of an old frayed rope, in order to reach for and grab a newer, sturdier rope. Specifically, 2025 would be that weird window of time where we have had to let go of the old rope in order to reach for the newer one.

I think we can all feel this happening.

Which makes me want to remind us that:

1. This world does require us to wear armor.

2. We can choose to update our armor at any time.

The meditation - New Armor - that I am sharing in the paid Substack space this Friday creates a magical environment in which we can lay down our old armor and receive our new armor, tools and even adornments.

In case you aren’t sure what is happening in that paid Friday space, it IS different than this free Tuesday space. In the Friday space, each week you get two short pieces of audio - an inspirational talk + a meditation - to easily center your practice for the week. You can listen to them once or over and over. You can listen to them casually, while you do the dishes, or more deeply in a meditative state.

We all know the best meditation is the one we actually do. The Friday space costs $5/month or $50/year and is designed to give you timely, digestible spiritual/mystical experiences that you actually look forward to.

“I'm so happy to be a subscriber ❤️ your meditations have more than paid for themselves in the few weeks since I've become a Substack member. Thank you!”

- Celina

To encourage a deeper understanding of the benefits of the Friday space, and to get you hyped about updating your armor, I want to share in advance the inspirational talk that supports this Friday’s New Armor meditation.

This talk, and the meditation itself, will go out on Friday as usual. I hope you can join us in that space - this week would be a great week to do it because these times are legitimately calling for new armor.

Until next time,

Jess

p.s. I am off-Instagram again. This Substack space and my website are the best places to find me at the moment. Remember, you can always reply to this email if you want to ask me a question or otherwise want to connect.

"I tried your Winter Solstice meditation and it worked powerfully for me. I’m looking foward to deepening my meditation practice with you in the year ahead."

- Miranda

“Thank you for this explanation in creating an inner world through meditation. I love your meditations deeply and having this framework allows me to meditate and discover my meditative places inside.”

- Z.B.

---

THE HOUSE

It grows larger,

wall after wall

sliding

on some miraculous arrangement

of panels,

blond and weightless

as balsa, making space

for windows, alcoves,

more rooms, stairways

and passages, all

bathed

in light, with here

and there the green

flower of a tree,

vines, streams

casually

breaking through –

what a change

from the cramped

room at the center

where I began, where I crouched

and was safe, but could hardly

breathe! Day after day

I labor at it;

night after night

I keep going –

I’m clearing new ground,

I’m lugging boards,

I’m measuring,

I’m hanging sheets of glass,

I’m nailing down the hardwoods,

the thresholds –

I’m hinging the doors –

once they are up they will lift

their easy latches, they will open

like wings.

- Mary Oliver, Dreamwork

---

“Consider the printed letters on this page you’re now reading. Notice: As soon as you focus your eyes on these inert bits of ink, you see what they say. The written words speak within you. The experience is not different in kind from that of a Haida elder walking in the coastal rainforest when his attention is caught by a large boulder beneath the cedars; he fixes his gaze upon a crinkly patch of lichen on the boulder’s surface, and abruptly, unexpectedly, feels the rock speaking to him. Or that of a Hopi woman who finds her gaze drawn toward a spider quietly weaving its web; she focuses her eye upon that small, spiraling creature and then suddenly hears herself addressed by the spider.

According to the argument carefully framed in these pages, reading itself is a form of animism, as uncanny as a talking spider. If we no longer feel ourselves addressed by mountains or hummingbirds, if our senses are no longer transfixed by the eloquent speech of a brook as it gushes over guttural stones, it’s primarily because those sense are no caught in a synesthetic participation with our own written signs (and with the newer communications technologies unleashed by the printed word). The ostensibly inanimate letters now speak to us with such a concentrated intensity that they effectively eclipse all the other, older forms of sensorial participation in which we once engaged.”

- David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

---

“These parasocial relationships felt so real. But real is often just a feeling. I had thought New York was the internet come to life: In the same way that you can scroll past a tradcath, a mommy blogger, and a Nietzschean bodybuilder in five minutes on Instagram, you can meet this same agglomeration of archetypes downtown. It was magic. But the reverse was also true—the ugliness of offline had seeped into the internet. Someone told me, “Hate and love release the same amount of dopamine for me.

…

It felt like making memes had become asking people to think about me, which I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be loved or hated. I wanted to tell stories, and the two no longer felt the same.

…

There were years I called offline “IRL,” but they seem a long time ago.”

- Honor Levy

---

“To the greedy eye, everything can be possessed. Greed is one of the powerful forces in the modern Western world. It is sad that a greedy person can never enjoy what they have, because they are always haunted by that which they do not yet possess. This can refer to land, books, companies, ideas, money or art. The motor and agenda of greed is always the same. Joy is possession, but sadly possession is ever restless; it has an insatiable inner hunger. Greed is poignant because it is always haunted and emptied by future possibility; it can never engage presence.”

John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

---

“How does meditation get rid of negativity?

Picture it this way: You are the Empire State Building. You've got hundreds of rooms. And in those rooms, there's a lot of junk. And you put all that junk there. Now you take this elevator, which is going to be the dive within. And you go down below the building; you go to the Unified Field beneath the building -- pure consciousness. And it's like electric gold. You experience that. And that electric gold activates these little cleaning robots. They start going, and they start cleaning the rooms. They put in gold where the dirt and the junk and garbage were. These stresses that were in there like coils of barbed wire can unwind. They evaporate, they come out. You're cleaning and infusing simultaneously. You're on the road to a beautiful state of enlightenment.”

- David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish

---

“There’s something about long stretches of boredom that I think is really useful. They’ve provided me a well of energy for me to draw from, and that’s kept me going literally up until this point. Being meditative as you grow up, you have to use your imagination.”

- Alexa Chung

---

“Nature is resilient, and we are part of nature. If you are losing faith in your fellow human beings, look around at the leaves and grasses, at any green thing. Long, long ago, when early life began to run out of food, nature created a miracle—a molecule that use the energy of sunlight to turn air and water into nourishment. Alchemy! We can do the seem. Take a breath in. The very air is a gift of that miracle process, and every breath out is a gift back to the green world. We are connected, always, and regeneration is inherent in life. Trust in that, and we will find our way.”

- Starhawk

---

"We have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons."

- Terence McKenna

---

“Have you been having conversations with friends about how weird things have gotten? I feel like I’ve been having these conversations a lot. The vibes are strange. It feels like what we had come to rely on as “reality” is shattering to pieces. In fact, this breakdown of reality is more than a vibe or a feeling. What we experience as reality is a collectively created consensus on what is “true”; our communities are fragmented, and thus so is our reality.

Is climate change real? Do vaccines cause harm? Is capitalism evil? Do individuals and “nature” exist?

Our communities are fragmented because within our families we don’t hold the same views; within our neighborhoods, workplaces, and cities we don’t share the same views. Meanwhile, when we enter cyberspace, we careen through a funhouse of rapidly shifting, largely amorphous views, at warp speed. It makes sense that many of us are feeling disoriented.

I suppose this is how it feels to be entering the age of Aquarius. The Age of Global Weirding.

In Norse magic the wyrd is the web of fate, conceived of as a fabric, a warp and weft of interlocking threads, which becomes loose and unravels in times of collective chaos. The bad news is that, well, things feel chaotic and uncertain and stressful and humans don’t like that. The good news is that when the web of the wyrd becomes loose, new futures become possible, transformation becomes inevitable.

The questions for us now are: what do we want to transform? And, how can we stay centered amidst the high winds of global weirdness to help midwife it into being?”

- Amanda Yates-Garcia, Mystery Cult

---

“No one knows what to believe any more. The conspiracy theories can’t all be true; after all, many of them contradict each other.

The cracks spreading in the facade of reality will continue to widen.

…

We are not mere victims. We are all participants in the metamorphosis that is available in these times. The war for reality is not to be won with familiar weapons.”

- Charles Eisenstein

---

“As I sat in Heathrow for hours I felt like a brand spanking new sponge fresh out of the crinkly package, ready to soak up all the colors and shapes and sounds around me. I looked about to see everyone on their phones; some smiling intimate smiles, some laughing, some in intensely bored comas, but very few people chatting to each other. Here were people from all over the world missing an opportunity to get to know each other a little. I decided to rebel. I stared at the woman across from me until she looked up. I smiled at her. She was a little taken aback but returned it. A little while later she asked me to keep an eye on her bags while she got up to go grab a napkin. Of course! We had a little beginning. Later when she left to go to her gate she thanked me and smiled. We had won! We were humans! I made a resolution to do this from now on. I fly a lot.”

- Neko Case