I've been on spin cycle since leaving for Squam a month and a half ago. It's been a retreat sandwich with chickenpox in the middle. I'm relieved that all are complete and went as well as well could be (well, the retreats were FAR better than the pox) and now I can cozy down into Lodge and get with mah peeps for the season. I'm so excited for it to begin. While I was gone it *completely* sold out...
Serendipity lived up to it's name, full of AMAZING WOMEN, DIVINE SCENERY and INCREDIBLE FOOD, worthy-of-all-caps and standing in the kitchen at all hours.
Here's the photo recap:
Above the clouds. It always amazes me that we can do this.
The clarity of Nag's Head. Bonfires, dolphins, dips in Mama Atlantica, questions answered by the stars...
Goldmining. Classes were wonderful and I even got to paint a little bit.
Susie Pease, Writer. Artist. Busted.
Shelly Norris, Wild Woman and Goddess.
Jennifer Beltoff, Writer and Artist. Goddess of Patience and Winged Creatures.
Jen Gray, Weasel Sister of the Fire Clan, digging deep into the den.
Holy Glowing Lamplight, Wild Women! There is some serious magickal poetry brewing in all of the comments that came through for the giveaway. I want to offer a torch to every wolfsister who howled up, for knowing what you needed and asking for what you wanted.
It was no easy task compiling all names, many of them several times from two blogs and Facebook, so I'm a bit late in announcing this, so I'll get right to it.
Send me an email and I will get welcome letters out to you :) And include your mailing addresses so that I can get your Mother Of All Releasings Ceremony kits out to you, as well.
*howl*yip*yowl*
Thank you, beauties. I didn't think I could be more excited about beginning this Lodge (on such a perfect day) and leading up to the Solstice release, but somehow there is a fire burning so brightly now, it's destined to keep us warm and in our creative, healing spaces all through winter. Yeah!
I'm catching a plane to North Carolina in a few hours, and while I'm away making art and merry on the beaches of the Outer Banks, the last week of SouLodge registration will complete. On Monday, the 24th, I'll close the flap and cleanse out the classroom, and we.will.be.ready.to.roll, sisters. I have so many yummy things to share with you, and for us to create.
Have a magnificent week and weekend, and thank you ALL, every shining one of you for supporting this work, especially the luminescent woman who made this giveaway possible.
An amazing and illuminated woman has gifted us with the opportunity for TWO women to join the next session of SouLodge coming up on October 31st. Leave a comment to enter....and include the words light, lit, lamp or glow in your entry. Share the link in your public spaces by "liking" or "tweeting", by blogging it, or sending out an Owl messenger-let me know and I'll enter you that many times. Good luck!
I'll announce the winners just before 4 pm tomorrow.
We're getting so cozy close to the next session of SouLodge, registration is open for one more week and class begins in two, just before Sacred Samhain, on All Hallow's Eve and at the beginning of the celebration of Dia de los Muertos. I purposely chose this week to begin class, as it is thought to be the time of year when the veils between worlds are thinnest and access to spirit guides and ancestors is within greater reach.
This season we'll be talking a lot about releasing, giving back to the Earth and giving away what no longer serves. It will also be a time to come into clear consciousness about the holidays and how we can create ceremony and ritual around them that feels in alignment with the work of awakened women. A giveaway season is a beautiful time to give away pieces of spirit medicine that has waned in power for you, but may prove to be potent to a dear sister, child or beloved. This time I have a special secret releasing kit I'm mailing out to all participants, which I'm basically silly-giddy about. This will tie into the Mother of All Releasings Ceremony I have planned for Winter Solstice. So I'm sort of feeling like one of Santa's elves...
As with the last session, I'll be offering one-on-one phone council sessions with women in the class, which was a total joy for me last round. As we worked our way around the medicine wheel- connecting with our totem animals, creating traditionally inspired crafts to bind the teachings, and coming into acknowledgment of what our obstacles are, these sessions proved as powerful gateways for women to dig a little deeper with support. The secret is that I delight in these sessions as much as the women I'm working with. They are pure energy and light, of waking up and standing tall. Some of us designed ceremony together to push through resistances, talked over obstacles, while still others just needed permission to be. To know what they know. To do what they do. It's all such an enormous blessing.
I hope you'll join us in the Lodge, run and howl with those already assembled and gearin up. It would be my honor to guide you into and through your deeper landscape where the elements and creatures share their wisdom, and the sisterhood is a warm fire to dance around.
The Moon is in her full splendor tonight as I write this. I am filled with so many feelings surrounding your releasing comments. We all have so much fear, not-enoughness, anxiety, doubt, control, anger, grief...the old baggage, as someone called it. This connection with each of you, over what we are holding onto...well, you know I consider it my life's work to Let Go. To release again and again whatever stands between me and peace. Me and love of one and all, my foolish self included. So this has touched me so deeply, and come at the perfect time.
Misty mentioned that she wanted to "shake it" and I remembered these words when I sampled (and pre-ordered) Florence's new record today, Ceremonials. A beautiful sign! It popped into my field of vision at iTunes just as these thoughts were percolating in the cauldron of my consciousness, meditating on just how heavy the loads are that we carry. We sometimes forget that in order to keep our baskets full of what nourishes us, we must move on from the old.
I drove around a little bit tonight, shaking it off, and thinking about what a powerful ritual it would be if we all gathered collectively, on the same day around the world, to Shake It Off. Let it go. And as Florence says, "I'm always dragging that horse around... tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground..."
I danced in the driver's seat. I threw the devil off my back.
And that's when it hit me like a blast of light.
WE NEED A CEREMONY FOR LETTING GO.
I've created them many times, but never for a large group. And so there came a vision.
Here is how the full moon evening unfolded in my nest from there:
I sat in my studio and put together a Letting Go Kit, which I decided to mail out to each of my Autumn SouLodge sisters the week we begin class on October 31st. It will include the simple ingredients we will need to create a charged-up little container to hold all that we want to release.
The session will end on December 4th, and we will have once again circled around the Medicine Wheel and worked with the elements that have come up for us, looking at where our resistance is, flushing out what wants to come into the light and be expressed and embraced, come face to face with our guides and creature totems, working with them to overcome the obstacles that give us access to Source in a way that is meaningful to each of us. We will have discovered what no longer serves and how we want to proceed. We will declare it.
THEN, when Winter Solstice arrives on December 22nd, we can all take our little packages stuffed with fear, grief, not-enoughness, doubt, rage, disappointment...ALL OF IT to the fire. We will take it to the fire: be it at a roaring bonfire, a fireplace, a chiminea on a deck, or a firesafe bowl in our kitchen sinks, and we will burn those babies up. ALL ON THE SAME DAY, creating an agreement with our sisters around the world to Let It Go. To dance around the sacred fire of our awesomeness and watch our bundles go up in flames! Can you imagine?!
And all just in time for the New Year, which is by no accident, 2012, the year the Mayan calendar beckons us to move into the next dimension of consciousness. The one in which fear, doubt, self-loathing, and not-enoughness, are not needed. They have tried to serve us well as protective forces, however, their time is up. The darkest day of the year is the perfect time to create energy around this letting go. How can we go wrong if we collect all of our desires to release, and do it in sacred, feminine ceremony in the company of hundreds of other women on the cusp of the return of the Light?
Time and again, the image of dancing around a fire comes up for us in journeywork in the Lodge. It is time to make this real!
I was guided to call this The Mother Of All Releasings Ceremony.
I'll make a huge deal out of this on my blog, as well as in my public spaces, I'll provide you with buttons to share at your home sites if you wish, discover a way for those of you who cannot attend Lodge to participate, and share all of the details of how to take advantage of this potential for transformation and make it real. I'll share a video from around a fire to connect us all in this rite of passage on the day of Winter Solstice.
There will be flames. And there will be dancing! And there will be releasing.
This is an exercise in letting go and of binding the medicine. Of owning your power as an intuitive woman, which you do not have to try to be- it is your birthright.
Judgment, guilt, negativity, unkindness to our bodies, shame, stuckness -Mama Earth is always ready to take it from us, and together with the alchemy of fire, make something useful out of it- leaving us free to TRUST that we are so much more than what we needlessly carry around.
We get to take the first steps as a community, TOGETHER, to shake it off, in the Mother Of All Releasings Ceremony, on the upcoming Solstice.
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Thank you to Lauren of VisionWise, for sharing her work so generously with us here. She is offering a 15% discount at her shop using the Coupon Code: INTENTION.
Erica Wilson won the giveaway for the pouch, and she said, "Blessed be this season of release and balance! I wish to let go my belief that I do not deserve the beauty and blessings of my life. I deserve to be loved and can let it all in. I would like to cultivate the belief that I have valuable and beautiful and powerful things to share with the world. Bountiful, Beautiful, Blissful. Blessed be our Journey."
I couldn't agree more. Blessed be our journey as women in love with our lives and living our visions.
Thank you all so much for your sweet, wise and supportive comments about Bee and Miles. I am feeling so much stronger for it. I love this community so dearly.
Before I get down to business, I also want to mention that there are exactly five card decks left after the Squam raid, and they can be found in my shop now. It'll be a few weeks before the next batch comes in, so grab 'em while they're hot.
Now, it is with proud relief that I announce that there are officially no more medicine bundles available in my shop for sale. Because the good news is that I've evolved into full time teaching of how to discover and create your own medicine by my heart's own hearth, the SouLodge (the Autumn Session is coming up on October 31 and filling quickly). This has felt like the right direction for me to go, as the intensity of new energy among women is building, and Trust that we know our own way is becoming a common language between us. My invitation to you is to accept your own power to go in, dig deep and goldmine for that inner medicine. What is coming up in these sessions (I'm hosting a private one right now, as well) is really astounding, and I'll share some of what women are saying here soon soon.
I've put in a shiny lump of hematite-for magic, reflection, grounding, for removing self-limitation, for confidence building, and soul protection. And Lauren has graciously offered up a quartz point, which brings an offering of self-healing, removing negative energy, and clarity. I've also included some white sage leaves to bump that purification up a notch further, and really assist in dissolving those aspects that are ready to be released into the psychic compost pile and create room for something new to come into being.
Leave a comment here to enter, and if you feel called to, please share what you would most like to release down into Mama Earth as we pull inward with the changing season- or for those of you who live where Spring is quickening, release up and out into the fresh sky. Check back next Wednesday to see if you're the lucky winner.
So many blessings to all of you, as this fine and magickal month opens up her simmering brew of possibility to us all.
