Performance Art: The Crown Cycle

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This piece titled The Crown Cycle was completed during the week that contained summer solstice, transition to Cancer season, Capricorn full moon. The energy is full of considerations of the masculine, feminine, emotions and permission to express, connections to patriarchy, the old identity structure that makes a woman’s identity only visible through a male’s gaze—his terms, his shapes, his boundaries.

This piece addresses my desire to redraw boundaries between for feminine energy. Often, those boundaries are drawn through what isn’t able to be expressed. We exist in constricted shapes created by heavy emotional burden. I need a ritual to honor the cycle of a woman’s experience—as a child full of vivaciousness, a woman full of vitality, a crone full of wisdom—in it’s pure unadulterated state.

The Child

As a young girl, I spent hours planning what I would wear. Time was forever and planning outfits was the most important thing because I wanted to make sure to express who I was through the way I dressed. My mom drew pictures of my clothes on small cards so I could have an inventory. She was incredibly creative and had a talent for art and drawing. This is a cherished memory of mother-daughter bonding. But vivaciousness turned into internal turmoil. There painful memories reflect that the household in I grew up in was unstable. I didn’t receive the emotional nurture I needed. My dad implied her problems were all in her head. She was never really seen by her husband, my dad.

The Woman

I’m named after my maternal grandmother Anastasia. I seen pictures of her from her early twenties, wearing fashionable clothing and hanging out in Branch Brook Park in Newark and posing in photo shoots at a studio on Newark Avenue in Jersey City. With those images, I conjure up a zest-filled woman. These are cherished imaginations. But my mom didn’t know her mom like that. The vitality of womanhood was snuffed into depression–my mom remembers her as a fearful woman who wouldn’t leave the house. Anastasia lived in the shadow of my grandfather’s mercurial moods and bursts of rage. It was best not to be seen. She grew old, never learning to drive and being allowed to manage her money. The potential for wisdom from a life well-lived became a subtle bitterness.

Anastasia died in her early 60s; my mom was mid thirties. I was 7. Child, woman, crone.

When do we change from the carefree child to women with too much burden? When does my grandmother’s problem not be my mom’s problem, and when does my mom’s problem not be mine? We pass them along to each other in body and mind. The crone came to the woman and the child before her time.

When I was in my mid thirties, I recognized a pattern. I dated men from hetero culture who had expectations of who I was supposed to be. The inability to express myself, or, the lack of permission that they set up, was a huge burden to me. So, I set up strong boundaries. I ended or didn’t pursue relationships based on what I needed to feel seen and be expressive. I found myself more often single than in partnership. It was the lived experience of just how strongly the patriarchy has a hold on how women are seen—women’s identities are seen through men’s reflection, that is, what they see as permittable and valid.

The Crown Cycle: I am inside

I created the piece “The Crown Cycle” to honor the cycle of child-woman-crone, the stages of a female experience. Who we are (and were), how available we were to each other, how we took care of ourselves and beyond that, each other. The transition of child-woman-crone has not been straightforward. I wanted to see us clearly. 

I just entered my woman full-moon, mid-life stage. My mom has entered her crone stage. I have watched her heal, and become young again in her older age. I have healed and grown up into a woman that I am proud to be: happy, healthy, and free from thinking that I should be anybody but myself.

My mom and I worked on this project as an exploration of healing across generations. Mom painted the paper-mâché heads, and I attached flowers that are reminiscent of spring, summer, fall/winter, symbolic of child, mother, crone. Anastasia, my grandmother, was always with her rosary. I added one, plus 3 silver-painted quartz shards to evoke a cemetery-stone image, at the end of life. The eyes are absent from the skull heads but are present. Anastasia is absent in form, but always watching; I as a child was always watching the adults; my mom is always watching memory. And we are all women who had different levels of visibility. I at times want to be unseen, like my mom, and Anastasia, through her agoraphobia, was literally unseen—a far cry from the smiling face of her youth that was always posing for cameras.

The candle is reflected in the mirror; it is lighting the way to transformation.

I asked my mom why she made skulls with half hair, half skeletal attributes. She said the “the skull is the vessel of the brain, the part of us that perceives and translates the exterior stimuli. Hair is so visible and SO much an exterior judgement factor.”

The performance was done in front of a mirror as I wore the child-mother-crone crown and reflect. I reflected on the image in the mirror and also memories of me, my mom, and my grandmother. I recited “I am me, I am she, I am her” and rotated the heads, passing through the stage of child, woman, crone.

My mom and I are not in current geographical proximity, so I offered the performance to her online. I share it now with you. The performance is a healing transmission across my matrilineage and honors the cycle for all women who constellate the seen/unseen child-mother-crone.

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Psychospiritual Growth: Peak experiences, God, and transformation

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Psychospiritual growth is supported by creative expressive practices. Writing is one of them.

One day in the fall of 2018, I sat at a library in 29 Palms, California and re-read a hardcopy essay that I had been working on for a while. What I was trying to say wasn’t coming through. I had to open the conversation up—ask what the words wanted from me.

Visionary artist Allison Grey’s work, including her work that conveys her the origin of her worldview: chaos, language, and secret writing

The essay was about the journey inside to inner space—extolling the virtues of personal evolution. It’s part of the process of understanding “higher purpose.” But my essay was falling flat. Phrases like “finding myself,” “knowing myself,” “higher purpose” felt deflated. They lacked force. A reader could get a sense of what I was referring to, but couldn’t feel the electricity in my experiences, which is what gave me the enthusiasm to write about them. I couldn’t activate the experiences for the reader—which was what I was trying to do. I wanted the essay to convey a feeling of motion, transformation, which translates to excitement–this is what my journey inside had given me. I wanted to convince the reader to embark on theirs.

  • This is the transformation from human reality to the spiritual one.

I started play with the medium, the language, by going in and out–shifting my awareness of shape of the letters on the page, focusing and unfocusing my vision, moving from words to shapes words strung together made, and then back.

This became dharana—meditation—on the words. I was singularly focused on them. My field of vision started to blur. My peripheral vision blurred, too, and the library bookshelves turned into cases full of neon beams of light, and the books on them became crystals. The idea of the interconnectedness of all of the ideas, writers, and me to them became apparent. It registered in my mind as a felt sense registers in the body. And then I had a fleeting thought I was a medium, a part of this vast network who, through the act of writing, pulled ether into material and with that, create our world because information is our world. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction in the core of my being, then, and the vision vanished. The meditation was broken.

I left the library, touched by the experience, activated to another level, and fulfilled. Part of my higher purpose was being in dialogue, literally, creating words. I trusted that the words to share this experience would come to me. They did when I applied astrological insight.

I checked my natal chart for transits, which are contacts of placements (and noted through the shapes of the angles that the placements make). The universe is in constant motion. The celestial bodies are dynamic. The sun (creativity) was in Scorpio (transformation), making a contact to my Uranus in Scorpio. Uranus is the planet that represents higher consciousness and breakthroughs. The correlation doesn’t mean causation—the sun contacting Uranus didn’t “make” me have that momentary lapse in reality. But my awareness of the motion, the contact was power; the knowledge allowed me to engage with the cosmos in a meaningful way by starting a reflection (in my mind) on breakthrough , while noticing how my human reality broke down around me.

Visionary artist Alex Grey’s work, a painting titled “Universal Mind Lattice”

In the years since this experience, I have come to call it a peak experience. It’s a flight, a trip out of the ego, the everyday and into the nonlinear spaces beyond shared human reality. It’s what people using psychedelics seek. But peak experiences that do not integrate into human reality (of the individual) lack the meaning. They’re fun trips during which you knock on Self’s door, that all-pervasive consciousness, but then play chicken and run away. 

I realize that the point at which my excitement (in writing the essay all those years ago) dissolved was the point at which I realized most people live in fear of the numinous (of Self, of God, of whatever the invisible force beyond us is). My excitement was not to be reciprocated. It made this peak experience feel like something I needed to hide, as if it were only mental and I was mad as in crazy. No, the astrology of that time and space didn’t make me have a peak experience. Uranus and the Sun affected the energetics of my mind and how I perceived reality. But the portal there that opened was mine to step through. I find this point to be the one that is misunderstood about my position the most. How could I be “into astrology” and still “into God/Self” (which I collectively refer to as the “numinous”)?

  • The celestial ecosystem (the effects of the planets reaching my direct experience) is just that, an ecosystem. I am within it. I have a relationship with the stars and planets just like I have a relationship with Earth, the oceans, the trees. When I was ready to witness beyond the confines of human reality, I did.
  • God is there, too. It is Self, the all pervasive consciousness
  • Self is numinous, mysterious, full of grace and wonder because I from my human perspective cannot see what it sees. I see for it, during peak experiences, when this awe-inspiring force reveals itself to me and I to it, my true nature. 

I have no fear of the numinous. I do, however, have the very human fear of being misunderstood. The fear has been so strong at times that I have withheld my voice and writing. Exploring the heights of the higher unconcious, the realm of the psyche that holds our soul evolutionary potential, is humbling. And we do not live in a world that values humility. Rather, the subtle nature of these powerful peak experiences has us turn them into spectacles of trippy vision where, if not meaning, we can at least get a good story out of it. 

I believe this reason is why my essay initially fell flat, and I slid into the quiet space of not recounting the story. 

But the experience in the library should not be silenced.  

As a I writer, I am a node on the network of words. Letters, words are power. My higher purpose—that which I seek so that I can offer to others—is to be a conduit for expansive conversations, ones in which words become a key to unlocking pathways toward transformation.I hope my excitement comes through here. I hope the power in my words reaches you. The years since this experience have given me integration, along with studies in psychosynthesis, the spiritual psychology developed by an Italian physician who was a contemporary of Jung and [briefly] a student of Freud. There is no human clarity in peak experience. There is numinous clarity, that an underlying energetic network connects us all and that network is sentient, ready to open the door to those who knock while recognizing that their humanity is exactly that which shuts the door again. We are all Self, God, spirit. This terrifies us because of the meaning behind the power of those words.

This transformative experience reminded me that not only am I spirit in nature, but that if I fear the numinous, I fear myself.

May all beings be happy and free // Om lokah samastah sukinoh bhavantu

***

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who would like to work with me on your journey of psychospiritual growth or integrating transpersonal psychology with your client practice, go here 
  • If you are a GenXer who wants to learn about a transpersonal worldview and write your own story in a group setting online, go here
  • If you are interested in my work with language and changing the mental healthcare narrative through transpersonal psychology, I invite you to read the curated pieces from my portfolio that are on this website and reach out

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences

Psychospiritual Growth: Homa for the commons

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Psychospiritual growth is not an isolated and individual process. It happens as we are embedded in the ecosystem of the Earth.

Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist advocating for an ecological civilization, advocates for organic farming and the food chain. She participated in the creation of the “Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth,” a manifesto to underscore the interconnectedness of all beings. She says that all beings have a right to life, and commons, the resources we share like food, air, and water, should not be poisoned or polluted. Disruption of the quality of the commons affect the sustainable exchanges among living systems. We are depleted by poisoned commons—and that includes human knowledge.

Vandana Shiva

I’m highlighting Shiva’s work because I find connection with it as part of the emergent planetary culture, the movement toward conscious lifestyles and consideration of all living systems on the planet. There are others, too—think tanks, activists, and visionaries—who are creating the spaces and action around an ecological civilization, one that moves toward a symbiosis that supports all beings and systems on Earth.

Human knowledge is part of the commons. We share the resource of thoughts. What our minds consume influences what our bodies and states consume. Traditional and social media deplete our psychic energetic reserves when overconsumed. Mental imagery and the ability to think beyond ourselves can be distorted. There’s no easy way to participate in an ecological civilization without doing inner work—this is the entry point for self care into the conversation. Planetary culture acknowledges our psychological health and behavior mitigates our consumption of natural resources.

Homa, the fire ceremony that I offer on a regular basis, clears subtle energies across dimensions. There have been studies done on the effect of homa on farming. Homa also works to clear the psychic plane, too, although those effects are harder to measure. Individuals have conveyed a mental clarity, a lightness in the mind perceived after sitting for homa. Homa is a link between self care, mental wellbeing, and our ability to make the perspective shifts and behavior changes that support action in line with planetary culture. This is why I offer homa through online and real-time ceremonies on a regular basis.

Homa fire in a kund

The Bhagavad Gita, Hindu scripture, says that all beings depend on food. We feed the fire our thoughts with offerings of cow dung, ghee, rice, and herbs. The dung and ghee are from cows, who eat grass, which grows in the soil, which is fed by rain and wind that moves clouds through the air—analogous to the regenerative cycle of life, and how each part has a place in it. The offerings are a yagya: an oblation, service, a purification, in which the offering of material on the mental plane becomes a selfless act to the fire. The fire, in a spiritual sense, the core of consciousness. Fire is the infinite divine energy.

Consider how you can gaze upon a tree and find beauty in that form of nature. Similarly, we can gaze upon the fire and allow an encounter with the divine—the light of the flame in the fire is the light of divinity within us. It is the impulse for a transpersonal connection, the feeling of a relationship to beings beyond ourselves. So, by working on the individual level, we are supporting the work to clear the mental plane, purify the commons of human knowledge, find rejuvenation in infinite divine energy, and through those connections, cultivate a relationship to society and planet that honors the interconnectedness of all beings.

Idam na mama * For the greater good of all

***

Hi there! Thanks for reading. I’m a writer, editor, and transpersonal guide who explores psychospiritual growth.

I write my own story. In that light, my writing is service–the stories I share about my own psychospiritual growth, the process of self exploration & self transformation, and the way culture affects us are my gift to the world.

I share the knowledge and processes that anyone can implement to achieve inner peace. This is a transpersonal point of view and embodied transformation through creative writing.

And, I explore the deep stuff–what we do when we recall past life experiences; how we engage the archetypal resonance of embodied experience; when to call the “weird stuff” you’re experiencing a spiritual awakening and when to call a mental healthcare practitioner.

  • If you are a mental healthcare professional who would like to work with me on your journey of psychospiritual growth or integrating transpersonal psychology with your client practice, go here 
  • If you are a GenXer who wants to learn about a transpersonal worldview and write your own story in a group setting online, go here
  • If you are interested in my work with language and changing the mental healthcare narrative through transpersonal psychology, I invite you to read the curated pieces from my portfolio that are on this website and reach out

BTW: I love tattoos and coffee.

***

Curious about seeing the world and the mind as multidimensional? What does that mean for science?

  • Check out Public Parapsychology. Learn more about what psi is and why psi belongs to everyone. Join other seekers and citizen scientists who are exploring parapsychological phenomena for the benefit of understanding the spiritual nature of the material world.
  • Also consider joining The Parapsychological Association. Support an organization of professional scientists and independent researchers who are pushing the boundaries of our current understanding of the mind. Programming and publications include excellent resources for mental healthcare practitioners and healers who support individuals with transpersonal experiences.