Enjoy the tarot + earth medicine reading for February 2023
rebirth
I have been thinking about rebirth so much these past few weeks, maybe even months, as the animals of rebirth began appearing for our monthly journeys in the Spring. Jaguar showed up first, the Queen of Shadow work and the one who often appears for dismemberment, then Snake, the shedder of skin and the symbol of transformation, and then in August, Beetle came…a small guide of rebirth who turns literal shit to nourishment, recycling our difficult experiences into powerful spiritual lessons. My personal work with Vulture prepares me, of course, intimately connecting to death and rebirth.
Through this entire process with breast cancer, it has felt like the end of a dis-ease, not the beginning. A personal invitation to be reborn into the healed Angie, the one who has done the work. That might sound strange, but it felt like the culmination of many years of working through trauma, grief, soul loss, and heart chakra imbalances. Like there is this part of you—over the heart, that has manifested cancer in my milk ducts. Interestingly, the cancer developed in a breast I was never able to produce milk out of. That is not exactly true. The milk was produced, but it could not be expressed. (Is that a metaphor or what?) I had a child who died, and I remember how engorged and painful my breasts were, filled with milk and no child to drink. I put huge cabbage leaves on it, until they withered and I smelled like an Eastern European soup. I would cry in the shower as my breasts would weep milk. Except the right one. It would just stay hard and engorged and no milk would weep until it just stopped trying.
During those days, I often thought about this class on Death and Dying in college with one of my mentors Dr. John Raines. He said that babies cry because they know they deserve food, comfort and love. And the cry, he explained, was exactly designed to be uncomfortable for humans, it is a noise we want to stop. It is only when they cry and no one comes that babies stop crying. My breasts were the same. They eventually stopped weeping milk because no baby came to feed.
It is interesting that this tidbit came from a class on Death and Dying. We have those moments we face death both metaphorically and literally. Maybe we survive a great trauma that threatened our life, or we stand and face our demons and get sober, or we ask for a new way to be in the world. In the process of earth medicine initiation, we undergo the process of rebirth through the shamanic experience of dismemberment, where, in the journey state, we literally ask our animals to rip us apart, tearing at us, killing us in journey, so that we may rebirth. With Vulture as my guide, she asked me to release my soul. She could not tear me apart alive. This process of releasing brought up so many emotions and feelings of helplessness that had permeated my life…how do I let go when all I have been doing is holding on tight? It is a zen koan, a paradox for survivors. Somehow I did, though. That is the thing…somehow we do. We do it when the holding on is killing us.
When I had my first chakra balancing many many years ago, my heart was completely closed. The pendulum did not move. It just stood stock still. It disturbed me. I had learned through my many years of life how to shut my heart off. Immediately, the self-punishing thoughts flooded in. “Oh my God, I am broken. My heart is shut. I am a monster.” (This is why I teach my students to be kind and gentle when doing a chakra balancing.) It has been decades-long work to open my heart and to trust people. It was well before I became a healer that I started, but I knew then that the pendulum was telling me something I needed to pay attention to. Opening my heart involved many healers, many therapists, many releases, many times feeling so vulnerable and fearful that I took steps backward and then when I was ready, started back on the path.
I say this because there is no healer that isn’t a wounded healer. Our DNA, our strength as healers comes from our wounds. It comes from our humanness, not our divinity or otherworldliness. While I appreciate there are many who feel shadow work is not as important as light work, I politely, yet adamantly, beg to differ. Any lightwork done without being aware of your wounds ultimately will take you back on the same path again and again. You encounter the same lessons, the same kinds of people (friends, lovers, colleagues, enemies.) Our wounds are invisible blocks that keep us in an eternal loop on the spiritual path, like Sisyphus, the Greek King who cheated death twice and was forced to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down. Sisyphus’s story has come to represent any futile, yet difficult task. Unless, we can identify our own triggers, wounds, and blocks; make them visible then dismantle them, we stay in this endless Sisyphean cycle. This is the rebirth. To simply emerge from the tedious work, to slowly break down that rock, our wounds into smaller pieces, so then we can break that cycle. Then our journey isn't so tedious.
Where shamanic and earth medicine work excel is in the rituals, ceremonies, symbolic work of that rebirth. We call in the snake, the beetle, the vulture to help us find a way to break our cycles. This work is a lifelong process. I have been intimately involved with this trauma work and work around my own heart for so long it is almost comical, but also I didn’t start it to be a good healer or to write a newsletter or blog post. I started it because that heart, the one closed and unable to weep, demanded I look at it. This petulant, hurt child within me said, “I cannot be ignored any longer. I will not be neglected. I need to be loved.” It began crying and I began responding. And in turn, I healed those around me, who tried to get into that closed heart for years.
Self-care and self-love sound like such bullshit terms, but they are juicy, deep, life-altering journeys. They aren’t just bubble baths and dark chocolate and masturbation. Self-love embodies self-compassion, self-care, self-worth, and self-actualization. We must remother ourselves, or refather ourselves. That has been the challenge—seeing and loving myself unconditionally. But when I struggle, I look at my own children and think, "You are just like them--beautiful, perfect, worthy of care."
It is strange to see my body without breasts. I don't NOT like it. It is just an adjustment. I am almost starting to like it more. I have been trying to take some time with no bra and no shirt to just get used to how I look now—a huge scar running across the place where my babies suckled. My belly sticks out like a big Buddha belly and my chest goes in, almost concave. Right now it is all puckered and there are major folds in it that are angry and tight. They will soften over time. Just like the other scars I have healed in my life—things soften with time. I can honestly say that I feel complete, even without my breasts. This body does not seem ugly, or unlovable, or unworthy at all. It is simply an adjustment.
This is what healing gives you—unconditional radical self-acceptance. I have been working on it for years by demanding I love myself. I thought that if I just said it enough, wrote it out on enough intentions, it would happen, but the truth is—that isn't what did it. You are not in control of the healing timeline. It is something you cannot fake. You simply love yourself until you are willing to accept the love. That's the thing--for me, self-love was about accepting the love, not giving it. Giving love was easy for me, but accepting it was a whole other thing altogether. You become gentle with your inner voice. One day something weird happens—you get diagnosed with breast cancer, or your partner leaves you, or you notice that your face is wrinkled and your hair grey, or you break something valuable and through this long rebirthing process you realize you aren't mad at you, or disappointed, or embarrassed, or ashamed. You stand tall and you say, “Yep, that is me, still me, still the same me as yesterday, still worthy of love and acceptance. I love you. You got this, kid.”
You got this, kid. I love you.
Mothering Grief and Humanizing Healing: A podcast convo with the Biz Bruja
Though I live in the middle of Pennsylvania, we have some amazing healers, practitioners and leaders in the global psychic and healing community. I work alongside one of the strongest channelers of energy with my healing companion Sharon Muzio, the owner of Alta View Wellness Center. Sharon leads the Spirit of Oneness Holistic Expo too, which is the largest spiritual gathering we have in Harrisburg. Vanessa and I are both present in this circle. We mention Sharon in this episode, so just want to give her a shout-out. Because Vanessa touches on this a bit in the beginning, we live in a community that feels small compared to New York City, but we have a vibrant community of gifted healers here. And the beautiful thing about being in a smaller community is that we find each other—the brujas and curanderas and mystics and medicine people.
When Vanessa Codorniu came to one of my circles, her dynamic, earnest energy lit up the room. She had been working in the huge community of New York City doing shamanic work, psychic work and ancestral healing. She had just moved to our community, and we have been fan-girling each other ever since. I take her circles. She takes mine. I have been blessed to have her in my circle of friends and healer colleagues. She is a gifted practitioner, circle leader, psychic and more. This conversation was so rich and expansive. it is because we speak the same language. She is not afraid of a little shadow and magick. She had interviewed me for this podcast in December, so pre-COVID-19. I want to say that because we mention nothing about what is happening in the world. I think we would have a very different conversation today. But I love the conversation we did have. We had some connectivity issues, so if you hear a blip or two, it clears up in a second.
I hope you enjoy this conversation with me and Vanessa. Let me know what you think by dropping a comment below, or sending me an email at angie@themoonandstone.com.
New Year Visioning Retreat
The winter always stirs me into a creative frenzy. I want to organize and simplify after the holidays. I empty containers, pots, jars, drawers, small boxes...anything I have mindlessly put something into at some point in the hustle and bustle of autumn. I go through things, read the notes I wrote months ago, and to-do lists, then throw them out. (Goddess, that feels so bloody good!) Releasing, organizing and de-cluttering might not sound creative, but right after I am done with that work, the muse fills me, and I must create. Nature abhors a vacuum as we say, and I just want to fill this emptying with artwork and writing.
This is the time I energetically decide what I keep for the new year, and what I am ready to release. What is ready for release? What is ready for more of my energy? The problem with this process is that it is just me in my head, and I have been living with this stuff all year. It is hard to see the tree through the forest. All my stuff seems important or it wouldn't be my stuff! Sometimes you just need another set of eyes, another perspective, to remind you of what is redundant, what is extraneous, what is holding you back from a lightness of being.
The work for me is never about bringing in what I want. I know who I am and what I want. Maybe too much. I'm a leader, and a go-getter. I tend to have big dreams and enjoy projects, work, and offering myself to others. In fact, I often overschedule, over-do, overwork...this isn't always a good thing. I often have this nagging feeling that I am forgetting something, or that there just isn't enough time in this life for everything I want to do. And then in my darkest hours, the statement that haunts me, "I'm not doing enough!" What I do well is surround myself with people who challenge me. Not just friends, but a few strong spiritual advisors, and I also pay for support in the way of therapy, coaching, and healers who help me clarify, simplify, and re-prioritize my life in the most important ways. All this asking for help and direction has also informed what kinds of offerings I supply to others. If I need it, certainly other people need it.
After taking part in a Sankalpa retreat many years ago, I connected and understood my soul path so clearly that everything I envisioned, drew, and journaled that one day more than five years ago has come to pass. I can see how so much of what I visioned in that day clarified what is important to me, and what was standing the way of achieving it. Because of that day and my own struggles with simplifying and distilling what is important to me through other healers and coaches, I began offering New Year Visioning Retreat day at Alta View Wellness Center. This is the fourth year offering this vision board workshop. But it is SO MUCH MORE than just a vision board class.
I combine my studies in crystal healing, earth medicine, shamanic practices, art, tarot, meditation, and circle leading in all I do, but this workshop particularly reflects it. Watching people create vision boards these last three years only strengthened my resolve that setting intention in sacred space intensifies the spiritual work, creates a fertile place to manifest any intention and amplifies the creative fire for others. It creates a higher vibration and higher consciousness so we can achieve our beautiful goals. Most of us don't want to be rock stars, or write the Great American novel, but some of us do. For those with intentions of the peaceful, small-life variety, or those with big, meaty, lofty goals, I created this workshop to help you first figure out what is holding you back and then what you are ready to bring in.
We start the day in meditation and prayer, circle up. I drum and guide you in shamanic journey, and guided visioning through writing. We move here and there to find more creative flow. The energy of the morning is being in a waking trance state, almost, in and out of journey world, to write. I simply ask questions to spark your deepest wants and desires. From that spark, you begin to stoke a fire within you--the one that holds your truths and intentions. As we move through the morning, we journal as simply as possible. (What are you ready to release? What do want for your health, for your friendships, for your romantic life, for your work, for you?) And we uncover and distill what is most important to you and how to achieve it.
After our morning of visioning, we eat clean, homecooked food lovingly prepared by me. I cook vegetarian soups and salads for us. This is a retreat, after all, and I want you to feel cared for and loved. So all my food is created with love and Reiki.
Then we move into our time creating a vision board to hold the visions of the morning. Whether you want a new couch, a new job or a new perspective, we help you find photos, words, and images to hold your intentions and release anything standing in your way of the best you. This process takes most of the day. It is amazing how quickly the time flies. We laugh so much, and talk, and share space with other people also ready to make shifts in their life. If you have more questions, or want to register, just give me a call, 717-770-9109.