The Indigo Gateway (Ajna)

       As I travel through this life, from forest to river, oceans to mountain, I walk with purpose.  I tread toward the end goal of spiritual awakening, the awareness of love and peace, a place of transcendental universal understanding.  We all strive to be closer to Creator, even as we co-create our lives and situations to be in a place of strife or a haven of tranquility.  As we journey through life we exercise the muscles of our body and strengthen them according to how we use them.  Our arms are strengthened as we climb, our legs as we run, and our wisdom as we learn to trust our intuition and perceive truth.  Ajna, our third eye, is the muscle that we use to unify ourselves with all of life.  When we find this gateway we realize that we have always had the ability to stand in its blue and purple light and view the heart and soul of other living beings.  The wisdom that hides behind this door is able to transcend a wisdom beyond speech, a  knowing of truth where we can clearly see how the past effects the present and future, but not just the truths that seem to be, we can understand circumstance and situations for what they truly are.  Mental and emotional clarity act as a balance for our masculine and feminine abilities as well as a rudder that steers us down the spiritual path of what is harmful or helpful to all of humanity.  A swan stands guard at this beautiful portal to remind us that all may enter into the dwelling place of the master, but not all are able.  Ajna is considered to be the master as it is associated with the pituitary gland in the brain.  The pituitary gland controls the hormone function of all other glands in the endocrine system, regulating such hormones as Thyroid Stimulating Hormone, Follicle-Stimulating Hormone, Prolactin, Growth Hormone, Vasopressin, and Oxytocin to name a few.  Symbolically we can see how being able to understand all things for what they truly are in the past, present, and future simultaneously gives us a full body, mind, and soul connection to happiness and neutrality.  Ajna is a point of balance, where there is no positive or negative, love or hate.  The granter of knowledge lives across this gateway, allocating erudition to those fearless few who are able to detach themselves from physical earth and unlink the need for a desired result.  All of the elements, in their purest form, reside in this place to gift those who travel in imagination and super-consciousness with the realization that time and space are not linearly real.  All can be accomplished through penetrating intuition since living in this state of cosmic knowledge takes on personal meaning and purpose.  Swami Kedarnath felt that once he awakened to this Ajna state that he no longer simply knew truth, but he became truth.   This philosophy essentially states that the death of ego is the life of the soul, meaning that once we let our masks fall our real selves can appear.  When we allow our consciousness to relax and focus our minds, we find that we can see beyond the distractions and illusions that stand before us and have greater insight to live and create more deeply in alignment with our highest good.  I will remind myself that I am visceral and I trust my intuition.  I rely on the guidance bestowed upon me through my spiritual gifts, and it is safe for me to follow this direction.  I am my higher truths.  I am clear.  I know my own voice and I have a healthy mind.  My calm and peaceful thoughts have unlimited possibilities.  I can easily hear the voice of my soul as all of the answers are inside of me.  I am my spiritual truth and I am connected to my true path and purpose.  I embrace vision and proudly stand guard at the gateway to the divine.
Which eye are you watching with?

"I have three eyes: two to look and one to see meaning."
- Bellamor

Blinded- Step 4

    In the fourth step of our life changing journey we will make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  That sounds pretty self-damning when we say it that way.  A lot of us are recovering drug addicts, alcoholics, or may simply be working these steps as a means of emotional support and healing, so what good does it do to beat ourselves up with our own mistakes over and over again?  We must realize that this step of healing is about ripping off the band-aid, and it is the beginning of the deep wading through our murky souls.  Why did we turn to drugs to begin with?  Why do we hurt inside?  Why are we sad on happy days?  Why do we cry when nothing is outwardly wrong?  We've spent our whole lives until this moment blinding ourselves to what hurts our hearts, trying not to feel that pain anymore.  For people who grew up in a rough environment it was a means of survival, for adults who went through trauma it was a way to protect themselves.  Aren't we tired of blindly stumbling through life with our stone walls and high towers?  Yes, they have protected us in the past, but those same walls have also kept us in, kept us from growing into who we were meant to be.  The lack of sunshine beneath our self-made cement prison has stunted our spiritual and emotional growth without allowing us the much needed oxygen and nutrients to actually heal from what hurt us in the first place.  We turn to outside means to make us feel better because we never actually healed; we never moved on even though we ignored and pushed down that pain over and over again.  The only way to truly move on from our secret pain is to admit that our pain is really there and allow ourselves to FEEL it.  This step was critical in my healing process, and "The Pig on My Porch" is based on my journey and inspired by this step.  I began with writing about the first memory that I had deep within my psyche.  I was reminded of childhood play, secret desires, my shortcomings, hidden disappointments, and then as I grew I came to chapters that were a little harder to get through.  I wrote about the death of my mother, my sexual abuse, low self-esteem and mental health, domestic violence, and addiction.  I let one hurtful memory after another build chapter upon chapter until I had written hundreds of pages.  An amazing thing began to happen as I forced myself to recall every outstanding personal experience- by the end of each chapter I was able to look at my memories with clear eyes.  I was able to relive each recollection and feel those feelings in a way that respected my younger self, but with an adults mind and a fresh perspective.  By the end of my book I was finally able to see things the way that they really were, not just for me, but for everyone involved.  By the time I had transcribed all of my thoughts and emotions onto the once blank pages and placed that final period, I was able to do the most miraculous thing: UNDERSTAND and FORGIVE.  I had to look at my deepest secrets, my worst pain, feel it, sit in it, and then let it go.  Maybe a lot of what happened to us in our lives hadn't been our fault, we were the victims, the hurt ones.  But by pushing down our pain and ignoring what our soul is telling us is wrong we somehow become someone that we don't recognize.  We go from the victim to the culprit without realizing it, because we go to extraordinary measures to stop feeling what hurts.  It's time to look directly into that black pool of torment and calm the storm.  It's okay to let ourselves feel the pain that we've been running from, because only then can we transform from the wounded to the liberated.
What are you hiding from?

Sciamachy
   (n.)  A battle against imaginary enemies; fighting your shadow 

Why Women?

       Every now and then I stumble across someone who seems to legitimately not care about women's rights.  I can ALMOST see how an uninformed type male wouldn't understand the struggle and pressures of being born a female (or a male that identifies as female), but what really gets me is when a woman doesn't care.  I understand that feminism is MY passion, but how could any woman truly feel unaffected by the women's movement?  How could any female not feel ecstatically proud of how far we've come?  The only answer I can conceive is that we have done our job.  If a young girl has truly never felt discriminated against, looked down on, treated as lesser or dumber or weaker, then thank the goddesses that all of their hard work has paid off!  For those of you who are unaffected by the sweat, fear, and pain of our sister suffragettes, let me enlighten you.  For those who have never been passed over for a job position or told to return for a business deal when you can bring your husband to assist you, to those who have never been whistled at like cattle in a roundup or been told that their place was in the home, let me fill you in on what's been happening outside of your little bubble.  On August 26, 1920, the 19th amendment was ratified.  This amendment finally gave American women the right to vote after a nearly 100 year long fight.  100 years!  It took an entire century to convince the government that women should have the same rights as a man!  During this time reform groups began multiplying all over the United States- temperance leagues, religious movements, moral-reform societies, anti-slavery organizations- ultimately leading up to the redefinition of the noun "woman".  We get to live a comparatively comfortable life, whether or not we choose to pay homage to a legacy that over seven generations of women toiled to achieve through meetings, petition drives, lobbying, public speaking, and nonviolent resistance.  We no longer have to marry and bear heirs in order to be taken care of; we don't have to be subservient and obedient maids.  We get to vote, work a fulfilling job with the right to equal pay and we get to keep that job legally when we become pregnant.  Our husbands do not own us, get to beat us, or take sex whenever they choose.  WE choose to become doctors, lawyers, ministers, astronauts, to own property, to own a credit card, to fight on the front lines.  WE CHOOSE to have bank accounts, serve on a jury, take birth control, wear practical bathing suits, go to college, breastfeed in public, or run the Boston marathon.  Watching the Olympics was a crime for women, punishable by death (!), for the ancient Greeks.  Women in New York City were banned from smoking cigarettes in public until 1908 because it was considered unbecoming.  English women were disallowed to play in soccer matches until 1971 because the game was declared unsuitable for the female body.  To this day it is supposedly still LEGAL for a man to beat his wife in South Carolina, as long as it takes place on the courthouse steps on a Sunday.  The town of Owensboro, KY has a law that prohibits women from purchasing hats without her husbands consent.  It's still illegal (though unenforced) for women in California to wear a housecoat while driving, and the city of Logan, Utah prohibits women from swearing.  All of these ridiculous grievances aside, women who reside in countries other than our own are still being treated as less valuable than men, and in some cases less valuable than animals.  Saudi women were banned from operating vehicles until June of 2018.  In Yemen women are only considered to be half of a witness when testifying in court, and they aren't allowed to testify at all in cases of adultery or sodomy.  In Morocco if a woman is raped then she faces charges for leaving her home without a male escort, and in this most recent case a sixteen year old girl committed suicide after a judge sentenced her to marry her rapist.  What happened on the planet earth where this sort of gross mistreatment is considered normal?  Where is the disconnect in our brains that makes women seem less important, less worthy, anything less than magical?  We are the strong, the passionate, the indestructible, the indomitable.  We birth this earth.
Any more questions?

“That woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator has assigned her.”

- Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions 

 (Photo by Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Getty Images)

"September 1953: Twenty-one year old Alice Penfold, a professional strong woman from Bury, near Pulborough, Sussex, flexes her biceps. She can tear telephone directories in half and lift a 146 lb woman with her teeth."
- Flashbak