Anybody else been rocked to the core in the last coupla weeks?  Last coupla months?  Last coupla years?  I mean, REALLY; I keep thinking it can’t get any more intense, but then it DOES, and I am left working with every tool in my PEMS (physical, emotional, mental spiritual) first-aid tool kit.  Is it just me, or are we moving forward at warp speed, sluffing off everything that’s not firmly latched down as we go hurtling into the future?

The image above is of the recent Icelandic volcanic eruptions, complete with amazing lightning striking into the volcano.  It’s not unusual or anything for that to happen due to the super-charged particles being emitted during eruptions…but I thought THAT’S a good picture of what it feels like is happening right now…Sure, a volcano is erupting, but just for good measure, we’re going to throw some kickin’ lightning bolts into the mix!    Just to make sure they’re paying attention!

For me, it has been a time recently of illusions being shattered…no, that’s not strong enough a word…exploded from the inside, down to the root of where I hold them.  Like dynamite bring thrown down a hole in a mountain, and the whole mountain goes KABLAM.  Yeah, that’s more like it.  No more mountain.  Mountain go bye-bye.

I KNOW it’s for my greater good to be illusion free….I KNOW we are evolving as a human consciousness and I KNOW we can’t carry our baggage with us where we are going.  But JEEEZZ. 

Next, I wanna see Godzilla stomping through the picture.  And the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz.

April 27, 2009

Tsunamis of Love

“Feeling change in the air…the larger energy cycle shifted in mid-April, and I feel it continuing to open up. The balls that have been up in the air will all fall to the ground in May, and June will be the GO month…a month of action. We’ll see!”-  Licia Berry’s status on FaceBook on April 26, 2009, which generated some questions

For many years, I have spoken on this website about the larger energy cycles that our planet and therefore all inhabitants are going through…the increasing intensity that we all feel is no accident.  On this page you will find the archives of years of my paying attention to and recording this phenomenon.

We are riding a series of energy waves, a collective tsunami of love if you will, that has increased exponentially since the year 2000.

I have received questions from folks wanting to know what is going on, but it is already said here.  If you read over the years and years of entries that I have posted about my experience of the larger energy cycles, you will see a build up and you will also see that I have shared my own human growth and awarenesses as I, too, change for the better.

You guys, this is the most remarkable time to be alive and awake.  Things are crashing down around us; in job loss, health crises, relationships ending, geographical relocations, etc…all of the stress factors that can happen to get our attention are happening right now.  All of this is happening in the name of our waking up to a deeper and greater experience of being alive and joyful, more authentically ourselves.  Yes, becoming conscious can be a challenge…but not becoming conscious is just the worst possible scenario I can imagine.

When I was young, I wondered why people seemed like zombies or like robots, and so sad.  I was engaged in life, played with the magic…over time, though, I became sad and more asleep, too.  I have compassion for myself and others….I think it is very easy, even if we have the best intentions, to be indoctrinated into the Great Slumber that so many of us partake of as we zoom through our very short life on this planet.  For many, the sleep seems the most comforting alternative…being numb to the pain seems better than feeling the pain.  In my case, though, I found that being asleep was more uncomfortable than being awake; when I was 21, some part of me realized I was missing something (I won’t retell that story here; it is at least partially documented in much of my writing, including my book Love Letter). I have been on a quest to wake up ever since.

Partaking of the Great Slumber has a terrible cost.  I am learning that when we don’t FEEL, we are missing out on the whole point of being here, in physical form on earth.  I have it on good authority that we came to experience and report back the data to our Source….and if we aren’t FEELING and processing what we are experiencing, we are cheating Source of that which we promised to provide.  Well, we can always come back another time.  But will we be awake next time?  Wouldn’t it be more amazing if we were awake NOW?

I have been in the process of deep transformation, AGAIN (gosh, it just keeps getting deeper and better!)  I have been on a kind of sabbatical since June of last year, a process of entering the chrysalis for deep transformation.  The most recent accelerator and assistant to my process has been that I broke my ankle in February, an injury which has catapulted me into a healing and re-balancing of my inner feminine and inner masculine.  Of course I had the option of seeing myself as a victim and, as I saw in my research, drinking beer and watching TV for 8 weeks (!!!) to pass the time while I could not walk.  But I didn’t want to do that.  When it happened, one of the first things I chose was that I was going to milk this occurrence for all it was worth.  And I have, and as a result, the insights have come so fast and furious that at times I could not write them down fast enough.  But this has been about more than writing it down, although I was encouraged to record this experience day after day.  This was a true body/mind/spirit metamorphosis, an experiential rebirth, one that can scarcely be talked about in words.  Again, this attention getter was no accident…it was a divine tool of assistance to help me wake up in a deeper and more meaningful, authentic way.

This is akin to what we are all being given the opportunity to do right now.  Of course, all of our situations are different…the details and the themes in our lives are individual to each of us.  But the larger tsunami of love is the same….we are all being given the opportunity to wake up to a deeper and more authentic life, if we will just cooperate with it, surrender in it.

The larger energy waves will increase….as with all cycles, there is an ebb and flow.  I felt an energy shift in mid-April, a sort of coming out of hibernation feeling, or a coming out of the chrysalis…what that looked like for me was a series of little energy releases, and then a huge energy release on my birthday April 23^rd, and increasing clarity and balance since then.  What I feel coming over the near horizon is that May is a month when we will be getting some answers to our questions we have been asking since January, and then June will be a GO month, and month where right action will be greatly supported.

Right action?  What do I mean by that?  I mean action that is carefully considered, a feminine trait in my language.  I am learning in my own life that action should not be taken unless it is discerned, weighed and measured.  FELT (there is that FEELING thing again) in all of my deepest places- body, mind and soul. 

In my own process and learning of allowing the feminine to lead, softness and wisdom are the way to approach first, then to ask the inner masculine to step in to take action based on the input of the feminine.  In the past, I have tried to force things, to make something happen, without asking the quiet sage of my inner feminine for her input.  I have learned a great lesson from this….the awareness of divine timing is something that lives in each of us if we will but listen.

So, like the rest of the human club, I am changing, and all areas of my life will reflect these changes.  I choose to surrender.  I choose to become an adept surfer, rather than to cover my ears and eyes and pretend the waves aren’t coming, thus resulting in my getting clobbered by them.  I choose to dance with this ecstatic universe, I choose to play and be who I truly am…I choose to fulfill my promise to Source by being as awake as possible, as much as my heart and soul can bear.  Hurrah, Hoka Hey, and Holy of Holies, this is the time.

first published on www.liciaberry.com 4-27-09 

It started when I spoke up.  I disagreed when they said the phrase “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” is untrue. 

My reference point for this is my spiritual understanding, built over many years of inner work and conversations with higher consciousness, as well as my experience.  What I feel to be true is that everything is just experience, and whether it is random or planned out before incarnation doesn’t really matter…what does matter in our human life is what we do with our experience.  We can either be in pain about it or not, suffer from it or not.  We can use it as the compost to grow from or we can let it be the shit that continues to pile up on our hapless, helpless selves.  I have chosen to grow from my experiences, and to use the wisdom that I have garnered as I have walked through the darkness, calling broken shards of myself back to me, to help other people.

Some have not awakened the tools within themselves to be able to walk through the darkness, through their own choices.  Some have so much pain in their life that they choose to exit the earthly plane.  But is it because their life was more than they could handle?  Were they unable to reach inside, grit their teeth, and tie a knot and hold on?  Did they not have the same capacity for joy and purpose and potential that I have?  Do they not possess the innate connection to their ever-present and ever-knowing soul and spirit and divinity that I do?  What is the difference between folks who can handle what’s given to them and those who can’t?

I don’t believe there is an essential difference.  When viewed from a very large perspective, even suicide is just another choice, just another experience.  From that perspective, anything we encounter, whether we judge it as painful or not, is still just experience.

But from a very human perspective, one that lives in this world and is invested in things going well, suicide seems such a horrid waste of life.  It is so sad to think about a fellow human being in so much anguish….my compassion wants to reach out and hold them in my arms, and make it all better.  “Don’t you know how precious you are?  Don’t you know what a gift it is to be alive?”  Having flirted with the edge of death myself a few times, I can say that what drives a person to consider taking their own life is definitely feeling there is too much pain to deal with.  It is a seeking of peace, I think.

But I didn’t take my own life.  What was it in me that made that choice, in comparison to others that DO go that final step to end their physical existence?  I certainly was given plenty of awful stuff to deal with.  Enough to make any sensible person want to make a hasty exit.  Apparently, I even tried to die as a baby, getting a serious infection a few days after birth at the site of my connection to my mother.  But the universe wasn’t having it; I stuck around. 

But I am not special or different….I am just another human being like the rest of us.  Why am I here, when others are not?

Is it fate when someone successfully commits suicide in response to their pain?  Was there something larger than me that prevented me from dying when I could have several times, and then prevented me from taking action later to end my life by my own hand?  Or was it something in me that won’t let go of fighting…..won’t let go of surviving whatever gets thrown at me….is determined to make the most of this brief sojourn on earth, no matter how painful it might get? 

In the moments after something painful inevitably occurs in our lives, why do some of us choose to look for the lessons and grow from it, while others experience it as yet another wave that takes them further from shore?  In that moment of choice to live or to die, what is it that makes the difference?  And are we ever “given more than we can handle”?

I have been ruminating on marriage and commitment to a Beloved Other recently since I celebrated my 23^rd anniversary with my sweetie, Peter.  I know there are many opinions about marriage as an “institution”, and I’m not here to argue with anyone or convince anyone about marriage being a desired state to live in.  I just want to talk about mine.

Growing up with my parents, I saw marriage at its best as unreliable and unstable, and at its worst, as a torture chamber.  My mother and father eloped when they were quite young, and my mother had me when she was a mere 18 years of age.  She went directly from her father’s house to her husband’s arms, and chose not to have time in her life to prove to herself that she could make it on her own.  Neither my mother nor my father had the benefit of time and experience to grow and mature in themselves before commitment to one another; therefore, they had by default to do that with one another and with their children. 

Their marriage was shaky from the beginning; they were quite infatuated with one another, so that held them together for some years.  But their lack of emotionally maturity caused them to fight with one another; their alcoholism caused them to unconsciously play out mean games, my father the angry dominator, and my mother the crying victim.  Their lack of boundaries emotionally and sexually drove them to have many sexual affairs by the time they divorced after 20 years of marriage.  Their union did not feel holy to me, their concept and modeling of love did not feel divine.  In fact, it felt like the opposite; the environment and climate that their marriage created felt unsafe, chaotic, frightening, even dangerous.  I was relieved that they separated; I wondered why they hadn’t done it sooner.

As I came into the age of wanting to be with another, I was fortunate to be drawn to a young man in my senior year who was still innocent in his own love experience, as I was.  We were able to be gentle and shy in our explorations of what love meant with one another.  It was an ideal first love, I think.  His respect and kindness with me were the complete opposite of the roaring rage of my predator father, who took what he wanted from my mother with a set of his massive jaw, and when she was not available, passed out from drunkenness, or hiding from him, he took it from me.

Later, after the blurry university years where I played out my internalized parental modeling in endless and repetitive fashion, I met my Beloved Peter while applying for a job as a server at a popular Atlanta restaurant.  I was at the end of my rope, completely hopeless in the love relationship department, jaded and burned out.  I had given up; interestingly, it was this surrender that opened the path for Peter and I to SEE one another.

We both tell the story similarly…we saw each other across the room, and there was a sense of recognition.  A feeling of “Oh, THERE you are!”  The feeling I had was of being drawn in to something much larger than myself.  Sure, I could have walked away, but I was curious.  This feeling was different than anything I’d experienced.

It didn’t take very long to understand that we were meant to be together.  On our first date, we walked Piedmont Park together, sharing spiritual philosophies and favorite ice cream flavors.  In the midst of my answering the latest round of “what’s your favorite___”, he said, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”  I just kept talking…to his credit, he bravely said, “Didn’t you hear what I said?  I think I’m falling in love with you!”  This stopped me in my tracks; how could I ignore it now?  This was my clue that this man, this relationship, this love was going to be different.

Oh, the pain of failed love relationships that I carried in my heart!  The sad example of years of mutual hurting that my parents provided, along with my attempts to find love by compromising my body, mind and spirit, had created a defensive and jaded wall around my heart.  This complete honesty from Peter, this innocence and confession of his heart, totally disarmed me.  Both of us threw away the game playing that seems to prevalent in the dating scene, and spoke deep truths to one another.  It was a great relief. 

Some data was still buried deep in my knowing that his honesty awoke.  Once the rusty door to my innermost center was sprung open by his simple offering to love me, an old song came faintly from inside; a clear stream came trickling through until it became a rumble and all but washed away the debris lodged there by my previous messy attempts to create relationship.  Peter was the reminder and personification of my childhood concept of love.  I remember skipping around the dining room table at age 4, pretending my love and best friend was playing with me. I saw him clearly; he had dark hair and eyes, and pale skin.  He loved me utterly; I was the apple of his eye, and he would never knowingly hurt me.  I could trust him completely; he was absolutely safe.  I now saw him in Peter, as if I had known as a little girl that I would find him someday.  Peter was a doorway to my most precious and innocent self, and that old knowing had been rushed to the surface by the purity of his love. 

On an ego level, I fought this for awhile; my skepticism about love and marriage certainly caused me to insist that we live together for two years before we married, and my poor Beloved has had to endure all manner of tests that I unconsciously laid at his feet, opportunities to prove his chivalry and the true mettle of his deep feelings for me.  Much to my great happiness and relief, he has always passed.  

It’s not that we haven’t had our human problems, one of which was my angst very early in our relationship about surrendering my protective ego to the purifying flames of greater love.  “Who will I be if I’m not Licia?” I would ask him with worried brow.  I did not trust Peter’s utter loyalty to me for many years, and still I have attacks of outdated, dark concern that seem to emanate from my dustiest inner file cabinet, memories of the ways my parents hurt each other. 

I feel that we agreed to come together at some level, perhaps the soul, for the purpose of healing one another.  We have had some very hard times; there have been periods in our 23 years together that felt like slogging through deep mud, when the spark and inspiration of our original meeting was all that we could muster to remember why we were together.  But we held on through those times, and it enabled us to grow in our mutual respect and knowing of the magic and integrity of our desire to love more deeply, to bring more of our Spirit to this earthly life.

I have come to see the love relationship, and certainly mine, as a Temple of Initiation, an alchemical cauldron in which we have the daily and moment to moment mirroring of our own self in the Beloved Other’s eyes.  If we seek true growth, if we crave spiritual learning and submission to a Greater Teacher, what better Master than our love relationship?  In the coming together of the two, a third is created; it is the classic Trinity, the union of the polarities, the positive and the negative, the yin and the yang, the Great Father and the Great Mother, or the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine.  Call it what you will.  Our mutual awareness of a Third Presence of Holiness created by our coming together, of a larger energy field created by our union has invited, inspired and invoked the best of each of us.  In moments of awareness of this Holiness, neither of us wants to lie or be less than pure with one another because that would be desecrating the union.  

The innocence of this ideal is something I can still feel today….the cockles of my heart know this innocence is real.  It is the divine, pure quality of real love.  It is high in vibration, it flies and dances on wings of rainbow colored light, it lifts and inspires, makes me closer to God/dess, yet causes me to weep in celebration of my earthly body which receives Him and holds Him in my arms.  It is a recognition that my True Love, and yes, that I, are physical representations of the Creator, the Divine Masculine and Feminine, the two poles that unite as one to create the All That Is.

Some people do not believe that there is such a thing as true love, in which both partners come together for the purpose of healing, consciousness, and lifting one another up to their highest potential, but here at our celebration of 23 years together, I am blessed to know better. 

Copyright Licia Berry, 2009