The Inside Skinny: Monsooning

Welp, the rains have been flowing, flowing, flowing over here in New Mexico. We used to call it monsoon season. Now, we call it weather manipulation – I mean, “climate crisis”. Thank you, HAARP.

Anyhoo, while it’s super un-great for the West Coast, which is where I’m guessing they’re pulling all this water from, it’s pretty wonderful for all the plants, and trees, and flowers here in the high desert, which are lush, and lovely, and saturated with color.
Alas, it’s not just the skies that have been flooding northern New Mexico this past week, it’s also my eyeballs.

Navigating these past 2.5+ years of koo-koo banana culture, and all the canceling, censorship, heartbreak and pariah-hood it’s gifted me, has been no easy feat. We’re all going through it in our own ways, so I know I’m not alone in being targeted, attacked, deplatformed, unfriended, uninvited, cast out, shamed, blamed, derided and vilified.

And so it is that with each crotch-kick, insult, shadowban and exclusion, I put my hefty array of tools and reframes to work, assuring myself that everything is happening for me, and that I’m being banned from ballet class, my favorite hot spring, international travel and my ex-best friend’s life in service to greater alignment, and another step closer to that real-deal soul family community for which every cell in my body is clawing.

Still, the trauma is real, and has this annoying habit of piling up when it’s not given a chance to safely and properly express. During lockdown, I saw it rear its head when I’d pull into the parking lot at the grocery store, heart racing, and I’d combine EFT tapping with prayer while mustering up the courage to free-face my way in.

“Thank you, guides, for keeping me safe, protected and invisible from the matrix minions, and the Kens and the Karens; and for surrounding me with sovereign soul family who get it,” I’d say, tapping around my face, while envisioning myself surrounded in golden light, resting atop my imaginary invisibility cloak.

But, then it started to creep into my social life by way of (even more) anxiety, and a pronounced fear of attending gatherings and events.

Who will be there? I’d wonder, observing a herd of fluttering wasps in my chest and solar plexus. What if they saw my stuff online, and have been programmed to hate my guts? What if someone attacks me, or says something really mean?

And so it was that I got in the habit of declining social situations, and public gatherings, and opting to isolate even more than I normally do, which is saying a lot.

I’ve been actively working on healing this new strain of social anxiousing with my coach and my therapist, and my friends who hold space for me, and who get it. So, when I was invited to a women’s-only medicine ceremony over the weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to feel a full-body Yes!, while experiencing zero fear or anxiety about it, even though I only knew a couple of the women participating.

Yay for progress!

I set the intention to allow myself to feel safe among a group of people, and to know myself as loved, and accepted, and appreciated during the experience. And I did. Sure, I was a little quieter than I may have usually been, but I felt like I fit in, and thus, enjoyed a thoroughly lovely, light-hearted journey with eight other beautiful, creative, supportive and compassionate women I am happy to call sisters.

We were enjoying raw, vegan lavender cake around the table when I was asked if there was anything I wanted to share as part of our integration. As the words, “I had set the intention to feel safe with people…” slipped out of my mouth, I was overwhelmed by the urge to cry. Though I tried to hold it back, I wasn’t really fooling anyone, and when a sister with purple mermaid hair and stunning blue eyes asked if she could give me a hug, I threw pride and social constraints to the curb, and let myself let it aaaaaallll out, thoroughly drenching her shoulder with a barrage of 2.5+ year-old tears forged of outcast angst, truth-teller bullying and heartbreak.

Man, was that a lot of tears.

On this end of the great eyeball flood of August, 2022, I feel infinitely lighter and more grounded. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known I’d been carrying around a few thousand gallons of grief, it’s just that I didn’t quite know how or when or where to let ’em loose.

It’s one of many lessons I gleaned from the ceremony this weekend, held in the arms and hearts of eight amazing women. The Feminine allows. The Feminine holds. The Feminine loves. The Feminine asks if you have anything to share, and genuinely wants to receive it, even if that “it” is sobbing, and heaving, and soaking your purple tank top straight through to your skin.

I am floored by the love and care and tenderness with which the entire sisterhood held me, as I released the hurt I’d been carrying for so much rejection, so much sadness, so much frustration, and so much rage at the injustice through which we are wading. Mostly, I’m grateful. So very grateful for those women, for that support, for my intuition telling me to go, to be brave, to avail myself to healing, and connection, and love.

Yay for breakthroughs, monsoon season, and badass soul sisters who get it.

How are you handling the heartache and the frustration, fam? What practices are you engaging to release all the ouchies and the anger? I’d love to know where you’re at with processing this giant, excruciating initiation we are together navigating. No part of this is easy, and I’m realizing – in a real-deal, experiential way – that the only way through it is together.

Thanks for being part of my together, Superstar. Means the multiverse.

xodk