Samhain Reading

Angie talks Samhain, letting go, emotional support corpses and pulls some tarot cards for the dark season of Samhain to Yule.

This is a picture of my Layouts book with my margin notes. I really encourage you all to change up things in your books, because connecting with the layout is the MOST important part. You have control!

I talk about this piece by Marybeth Bonfiglio called 41 Ways to Make Love to Yourself: https://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/12/41-ways-to-make-love-to-yourself-marybeth-bonfiglio/

ancestors

dear future ancestors,

As October draws to a close and we welcome in Samhain, All Souls and All Saints Day, I acknowledge the thinness of the veil. I hear the whispering in my ear of the ancestors. 

Mi amor, be strong. 
We are always here. 
Honor yourself when you honor us.

I create an altar for Día de los Muertos* in mid-October, when I begin to feel the ancestors pushing against me. I call them in. Ask for their help. It is not simply because I come from a culture that celebrates this holiday (though I do), but because I am a bereaved mother. And this American happy-happy culture does a lousy job of honoring the dead and grief.  

Day of the Dead is one of those holidays that has grown more and more mainstream with non-Catholic, non-Latino people creating altars, painting their faces, hanging up decorated sugar skellies, and dancing into the night.  That isn't happening because others want to become or appropriate another culture, but because we are all hungry to honor our dead. We want to celebrate our ancestors. We want to walk with death, rather than hide our grief and whisper to our dead in the still of the night. It is only in recent history that the dead were hid away from us, or that we were protected from the dying, the dead, and grief. All cultures from Europe to Asia to Africa and the Americans, cultures honored the dead.

My niece said to me a few years ago, "We come from a long line of witches, right?" And I laughed. It depends on how you define witch. When I call in the ancestors before circle, I call in all the healers and mystics in my lineage. But I also come from a long line of storytelling artists and mystics, bawdy women with good heads on their shoulders, from cooks and musicians, teachers and writers. But the drunks are there too, the ones that acted badly at that party once. They are the same. Because the ancestors were human. 

This is the medicina they bring forth—their humanness. And not that anyone wants my opinion on this, but this is the beauty and awe of the stories of Buddha and Jesus—their humanness existed, their flaws, their character defects and defaults, but still they sought to heal themselves then others. They found a path of spirituality that helped them and passed it on. This is also the lessons of our ancestors—that they were human and had a story, which is now part of your DNA. (Epigenetics is a really cool rabbit hole to go down)

Día de los Muertos gives me a time to honor all the ancestors as well as my daughter. I love to collect the stories of my family. The ones that make you go, “What the…oh my goddess.” I love to know their names, see their faces, try to imagine their lives and then think of the lesson they learned and want to pass on, or listen for them to tell me.

A few years ago, Vanessa Codorniu  held an ancestors journey at Alta View Wellness Center. I journeyed to Central America, where my family is from, and saw them all there. My mother’s Abuelita Isabel with the curly hair and my ancestors with Mayan noses and headdresses and painted skin.  Sitting in front of all of them, Vanessa asked us to talk to them. And so I did. I remember asking about my health and my weight and why I haven’t been able to lose weight. And my ancestor stepped forward and said:

You are the wishes of all your ancestors. 
Your body is revered by us because you are the child that is not hungry. 

When we do ancestral healing, this is what we do. We dialogue with our ancestors. We reframe. We understand. We humanize. We integrate. We break patterns. We forgive. We allow their wounds to be our wisdom.

So Day of the Dead, I create a space for my ancestors and my predeceased ancestral daughter, hang a painting of her and me that I painted in the early days after her death and another of my ancestors, the ones that whisper to me in my sessions. I put calaveras and bright colors all around the altar as well as food, water, flowers and candles. In my mother's native Panama, my family walks to the cemetery to have a meal with the dead. They decorate the graves and commune as a family. Those weeks with my Día de los Muertos altar is not simply a time to grieve, but a time to celebrate life. When we honor our ancestors, we acknowledge the wisdom they have given to us in life and now in death. 

But my ancestors were awful people. What do I do?

You can say, “Thank you for letting me be the breaker of awfulness.” (Instead of awfulness, you can replace that with breaker of our family trauma, pain, abuse, addiction, etc.) When we reframe our ancestors, put them in their historical, trauma, and family context, we can find wisdom, even if it is learning from their sins. Sometimes the deep grief of lives not lived, or their actions can move through us. We can cry for our family lineage. We can cry for their victims, for ourselves, if we were the victim or them as a victim and victimizer.** This ancestral work is about healing and releasing. We are fully in Scorpio season, and it wants to move through us. We get to be the conduit for compassion, love, grief, release and rebirth. And yes, we get to acknowledge the awfulness of our ancestors too. You can grieve that there was no wisdom to be passed to you.

We can  transform grief to gratitude through this process. Not for having lost, but for them having lived at all.


*You can read more about El Día de los Muertos at this History Channel link. Just a quick correction, though, we celebrate it in Panama and throughout Central America, so it is not only a Mexican holiday.
** In the Body Keeps Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk , he talks about how PTSD sufferers from the Vietnam War often recounted the trauma they inflicted on others as the trauma they could not heal, because there is no outlet for talking about the awful things they did during war. I could go on a rant on why this is, but suffice to say, when we train people to dehumanize their enemy, we set them up for massive trauma.
PPS. I have some great things coming up and you can check them out here

PPS.  you can listen to my podcast with the Tarot and Earth Medicine of the month right here at Anchor or on Spotify.

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Episodes 10 + 11: Essay about Grief, Suffering + Screaming

I took a little turn on my podcast as we were entering the holiday season to just riff on some ideas I have shared before, but seem relevant every year which is grief and suffering and how deeply important they are to just be in when we feel them. I just spent two episodes talking about all of this. If you want to hear some thoughts about why spiritual bypassing sucks, here ya go!

i come with the grief

As a writer, poet, and artist, I’ve done a fairly lousy job of sharing my writing on here. I have mostly only shared my work about crystals, tarot and spirituality. Part of my passion is social justice and work of people like me—women of color who wrestle with identity and spirit in the face of social injustice.

I also want to show up more in this space—my voice and my face and my artwork. I have lived a life or two. I am a child of an immigrant. I am Latinx. And so I cannot go through this life without being reminded of that. It informs my artwork and my writing and my spirituality. It is part of the space I hold for people—healing cultural wounding and trauma, ancestral wounding and trauma, societal wounding and trauma. This poem encapsulates that for me. I began this poem in a writing workshop with marybeth bonfiglio.in 2017 and started with a prompt: “What grief do you come here today with?”

This is a piece I have revisited a few times, and found it. I am reading it below. Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

thanksgiving

Two years ago, the snow gently fell all day, as I cuddled next to the fire with my newest little one, Zachary Michael. Though I was scheduled for induction, our little crystal baby decided to arrive early. My water broke and I labored for over thirty hours until he finally made his appearance. In distress, fluid in his lungs, they admitted my son into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for a few days until his breathing calmed, his x-rays showing his lung strong and clear again. My arms ached for him. I held myself for fear of falling apart, sending him Reiki from chair outside of his little plastic crib. To say I was in constant prayer was not an understatement. I called all the angels, the saints, the goddesses. I sat still in meditation and asked for Reiki and prayers on Facebook. I placed my hands on this crown and feet--soul and earth stars--helping incarnate. That is what it felt like--he hadn't quite figured out how this body thing worked yet. My friend Jack said, "It is hard for a spiritual being to become human. May the rest of his adjustment be easier than mine." And we laughed. 

As I sat in the NICU, watching my son struggle to breathe, I just kept thinking, "Scream, baby." They told me that the fluid in his lungs may have been caused from his easy birth--three strong pushes. That is what I prayed for after all and focused on--for my baby to just come quickly. He didn't scream right away, expelling that fluid in his lungs. He was content, lying on my bare breast after an easy delivery. But all that struggle down the birth canal serves its beautiful purpose of pushing out all the fluid in the lungs and pissing those little babies off enough to scream out the rest of the fluid that may cause pneumonia or infection in the lungs down the line.

I thought about that so much as I sat in the huge room of the NICU with all those very little sick babies. We have to scream and struggle against our own contentness sometimes. One of my Religion professors, my mentor really, used to say that babies cry and scream because they want justice. We come into the world knowing we deserve comfort, love, food, heat, people to care for us. No baby feels unworthy. No baby hates themselves. Babies scream because they won't settle for being ignored and unloved. And they stop screaming when people prove them wrong. 

The world talks about gratitude so much at this time of the year. But in this community, it is one of those spiritual principles we talk about all year. It is the elevator of vibration, carrying it up and open. Gratitude elevates our energy, opens us to healing. It is the gateway to forgiveness, love, and spiritual awareness. But I find that blanket statements of gratitude and platitude frustratingly miss the point. I think most of us recognize that we can say, "I am grateful for everything" and be done with it. But listing each of those things, appreciating the gift of them, the work we put into achieving and keeping them in our lives, recognizing their impermanence, focusing on those quiet moments of absolute thankfulness, are more the point. 

Gratitude isn't simple. We often have grief, sadness, suffering, illness, death, depression and other circumstances that create a stuckness in our own story. This stuckness can be an essential part of healing. It is the point before the scream. It inspires us to say, "I am worthy of NOT suffering." Think of the baby and mama pushing to get him out for longer than three pushes. They are suffering, pissed off. They are stuck in this tight space, ready for the world. If you have birthed a child, you know, this is the time when you are distinctly NOT thinking about how awesome it is to have a gigantic baby head stuck in your vaginal canal. You are thinking, "GET OUT." And the baby isn't contemplating how much fluid will be pushed out of his lungs. They are in stuckness, and feeling overwhelmed and can't really see the light at the end of the proverbial and literal tunnel. I think we do a huge disservice to tell people to be thankful when they are in that place of suffering. I believe with all my heart that all our suffering is there for a purpose, and yet it is not so helpful to be reminded of that during the suffering.

Struggling with gratitude IS the practice of gratitude. All we have to do is trust that our feelings when they arise are right and important and valuable to the next phase of our healing, even if our contemporaries shame us when we feel negative or sad or self-pitying. So the suffering--the feeling less than, unworthy, stuck--let this be the gateway to the scream that gets it all out. Let it be the catalyst for feeling worthy of not suffering. Can you find gratitude in your own screaming? In your own declaration of your worthiness? Can your suffering be a prayer of gratitude? 

When I am suffering, grief stricken or sick, I keep it simple. I look out the window, and find myself grateful for the beauty of a leaf twirling to the ground, for the air, and for my own miserable suffering, which reminds me that I am human and not a Buddha. For me, gratitude is an important spiritual practice, but our holiday of Thanksgiving transcends this individual daily practice. We gather our tribe and not gift each other things, not celebrate an achievement, or a person, or a God, but to collectively appreciate what we share as a family, or group of friends. We take inventory of those values we hold dear, and really appreciate what we have. As a society, we take this time to quiet and focus on home.

That is remarkable. It is wonderful to have this yearly community ritual of gratitude rather than just our personal daily practice of gratitude. And yet, I get why the holidays are challenging for so many who face dysfunctional families, estrangement, divorce, or grief. A few years ago, I took the opportunity of Thanksgiving to talk about grief during the holidays. I republished it yesterday, because I know so many of us revisit grief and suffering during this time. It resonated with so many at the time, and if you face difficulties during the holidays, it might be a helpful read. 

But I wonder if we can't reinvent this space of gratitude for those of us who are suffering this year. Rather than shaming those who struggle with gratitude, allow them to scream, abide their stuckness, marvel at their own righteous indignation of their suffering. It is our birthright after all to scream. It lets out the fluid stuck in our lungs. Helps us to take in fresh clear air, filling our heart chakra with the love for ourselves that we deserve.

My son's second birthday was on the 22nd. He turned two and is a bouncy, funny, silly boy who bring joy. I have so much to be grateful for, but I found myself grateful for all the screaming I have done in my life. 

So, on this Thanksgiving night, here is my blessing. It is the same blessing I gave two years ago after bringing my baby home. 

Scream, babies, and I will be dancing to your beautiful siren song of healing.

speaking of gratitude

This piece is reprinted from an old newsletter published in the Fall of 2013. May you find it useful.

During this time of year, our community explodes with talk about the healing power of gratitude. No doubt about it, gratitude changes the world--or at the very least, it changes your perception of the world. The phrases gratitude and positive thinking, manifestation and abundance, get bandied around without much acknowledgement of the how hard won those words and concepts can be for some people. The holidays are often trying times for those with dysfunctional families of origin, children facing challenges, the widow and widower, the bereaved parents among us, those suffering with depression and anxiety, and anyone facing financial hardship and so many other challenges. It can feel downright cruel to have the joy and cheer of the season thrown in your face while you are suffering.

Our spiritual community teaches principles of positive thinking and manifestation. This is my job as a lightworker too, after all. We do a great job of clarifying spiritual pathways for the seeker, illuminating our soul's potential and beautiful lessons. We love rainbows and positivity and golden manifestation. But to be perfectly honest, I think the New Age and Spiritual community is lousy at dealing with the hard emotions--grief, anger, anxiety, and depression. In fact, those emotions get demonized in many circles as the reason for illnesses, set backs, unemployment...everything from acne to obesity. Never mind that you cannot control the virus raging throughout your body, if only you could think positively, they seem to say, then you wouldn't cause your own illness and suffering.

Not so long ago, positive thinking really pissed me off for just this reason. It put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the suffering for every terrible thing that happens, for every dream that doesn't come true. In 2008, my second daughter died during labor. We were 38 weeks into a healthy pregnancy and all indications showed her to be a vital, perfect little being. She was born still, and they never found a reason for her death. When she died, I felt so betrayed by my body, so betrayed by the cult of positive thinking. I did yoga, meditated, ate vegetarian, burned incense, surrounded myself with positivity. I grieved out loud, so to speak. I wrote about grief constantly, and spiritual awareness or lack thereof. I published pieces publicly about what I was feeling, and wrote a blog about parenting after, how I navigated the world after my daughter died, and how desperately sad I was. I connected with thousands of other grieving parents. Everything about me changed. And I allowed it to change. During those years, well-meaning people tried desperately to shift me out of my ugliness. Some friends tried to get me to stop writing about grief all together, telling me I was not helping myself to dwell on the loss of a child. Well-intentioned people would often say after they heard of Lucia's death, "I believe everything happens for a reason." Or "You shouldn't write about this sad topic anymore. Your daughter wants you to be happy."  Deep down, I always believed those things, but it served no purpose to hear them. 

By far, the worst things said were "You have a living daughter. Focus on her. She needs you to be happy. You can have more babies." It insinuated that I had no gratitude.  So beside losing my daughter, they were telling me that I had lost my gratitude too. Truly, I was grateful. Filled with gratitude, actually, AND I was grieving. Those things are not mutually exclusive. Grief and gratitude often go hand-in-hand, and those grieving know that to be absolutely true. We are filled with gratitude that we had any time with them, whether it was sixty years, or six minutes.

Grief is simply another expression of deep love. We often miss our loved ones because we are so grateful for the amazing life we live. After Lucia died, I had such a deep, newly profound sense of impermanence. I clung to my living daughter, so grateful and amazed that she breathed so easily. When my normal grief was treated as unpalatable, I simultaneously knew that those people didn't really feel that my grief was unpalatable. They just were trying to fix this unfixable reality. They were trying to be positive, to help me see the bright side of my daughter's death. They were feeling helpless and ineffectual and my suffering reminded them that they, or rather, we have no control over this life.

Some in the New Age community say that all of our suffering is what we signed up for before this life--our illnesses, challenges, losses, traumas--to learn life lessons. And you know what? I completely, thoroughly believe that. But I do not think it is helpful in the slightest to tell a suffering person this belief of mine. Remember whether our suffering is self-imposed or not, we are still in pain. Whether our Higher Selves chose this particular suffering in this particular life does not matter. We have to experience the pain of it, the growth from it...we need to walk through it as humans, not as Buddhas. The amazing triumph of the spirit and human spiritual being is that despite our suffering, we manage to find the deeply intertwined matrix of acceptance and wisdom through that suffering. These are the vital soul lessons of a Spirit having a Human Experience.

The only time lightworkers should be in the role of the teacher or sage is if we are asked to be. Otherwise, we are simply equals, compassionate listeners, abiding in another's grief and suffering. To fully be present in our gifts, we need to release any ego attachments to "fixing" or "healing" anything or anybody. We are simply conduits. Remember compassion is nothing like pity. Compassion is deep understanding of suffering.  Most lightworkers I have met have come by their compassion through true suffering and rebirth. We must tap into our own memory of suffering to help others. Spirit asks us to hold space, to listen, to open our heart as a conduit for Divine love to pass through us into another, to heal through our deep understanding that suffering is part of our shared humanity. We aren't here to fix anything, but we can make it better simply by letting it be without shifting. Loving without expectation. We are asked to get profoundly curious about our suffering and grief. We ask other people to get curious too. We watch. We grow. We expand our compassion and love simply by allowing the emotion to be felt, then release it. We say we are sorry. We sit with them.

When I hear healers maniacally shifting people out of their hard emotions or tears, telling them these "truths" of theirs, I want to scream, "Shift them further into it, Sister. Don't try to heal. Go deeper. Ask better questions. Get curious."  It is normal and healthy to feel immense grief, anger, and depression when we have lost someone close to us, or have been diagnosed with a serious illness like Cancer or Multiple Sclerosis. Lightworkers do a disservice when we don't allow people the normal course of grief and acceptance. Those who cannot sit with death as well as life, with the dark as easily as the light, with our shadow selves as  graciously as our Highest Selves have no place in the healing fields. People release all the time on my crystal healing table--crying, laughing, farting, snoring. This is part of being human. Healers remain unflappable. It is only when someone seems stuck without feeling do I try to move them. I may physically open a blocked chakra, but mostly, I ask them to go further. "Go deeper," I may push. What is the real emotion? When we go deep, these emotions stem from two places--deep love or deep fear.

Don't get me wrong--I employed positive  affirmations, manifestation principles, prayer, and all sorts of magical thinking to help people create the change they want in their life, but we cannot do it by ignoring the normal, human emotions that arise in tough situations. And that is the key--suppressing your emotion makes you sick, while feeling them propels your spiritual growth. It has never been the feeling of emotion, but the not-feeling of them, that is the problem. As a crystal healer, when someone comes to me with grief, I simply help them become more heart-centered--to feel the feelings they need to feel, then move to the next feeling. Society doesn't give grieving people the permission to experience the entire range of emotions--either we expect them to swallow their grief, or be emotive and unable to experience joy. As healers and lightworkers, we need to be the ones to give our friends, family and clients the permission to grieve. The truth is that grief comes in spurts--sadness and disbelief one minute, relief and levity the next, anger in the third. When the expectation that we aren't supposed to laugh when we are grieving is there, the grieving person walks into a role already assigned them. They are swallowing another part of their experience. Take the person moment by moment, and allow them to be present in their grief.

That was the long way of saying--give the gift of abiding this season without judgment. Don't shift someone out of a hard emotion, push them into it. Get curious. Watch it ebb and flow and the emotion dissipate when it sees the light. Remember this: ALL of the time, bad things happen to good people. Any other way insinuates that I am capable of making a judgment about someone else's behavior and what they deserve and don't deserve. We all deserve love, acceptance, security and safety. We are all good people, AND bad things happen. How we deal with it, how our thinking changes, how we accept life's path, that is the pavement of spiritual growth. Allow it to happen without judgment.

stones for grief support

I have written about grief quite a bit. For year, actually, I had a blog devoted to discussing grief and parenting. It surprises me that I haven't written about stones for grief support. Why crystals for grief? We often feel helpless when others are walking through the Dark Valley of grief and loss. We ourselves feel lost and in a dark wood when we have lost someone close to us. I certainly walk through cycles of grief in my life. My daughter died on Winter Solstice, and the time when the day is shortest, I begin my descent into the cold world of grief. And yet, it isn't as desolate and cold as I imagine. Grief is the deepest expression of love and longing. We do not grieve that which is unimportant to us. Each year as it approaches my daughter's death day and birthday, I find myself remembering those dark days of comprehending the impermanence of the human condition, and the reality that we will live without her bright soul. I welcome that time. For most of the year, I live this life without her. It is an ache I have grown accustomed to. Yet there is something comforting and necessary about my season of grief. Rather than a sad time, it is a time for my family to come together and love her, honor her, parent her. We hold her together, our collective memory, our survival of this horrible situation.

This grief grid was created for grieving parents on Kindness Day in 2013. It contains Rose Quartz, Green Aventurine, Dravite, and Apache Tears. Under the center stone contains the names of the parents and the child they lost. 

We tend to label grief as BAD. But in my experience, grief opens a door to love. It is a heart-centered experience. And grief is not just one emotion. It is an experience of many emotions and thoughts--joy, gratitude, anger, sadness, longing, loneliness, guilt, pride, compassion, empathy, selfishness...I could go on all day. Remember it is when we suppress emotions, feelings, instincts, that our body begins to manifest dis-ease. But when we honor the emotion--good, bad, ugly--we honor all of our human-ness. That is why we are here, after all. A spiritual being having a human experience.

Crystal support during these times of grief is incredible helpful. Most crystals recommended for grief support help us remain heart-centered. The first stone mentioned with grief support usually is Apache Tear. Apache Tear is a form of Black Obsidian. The lore around Apache Tear dates back to the late 1800s. A group of Apache warrior in battle against US Calvary were outnumbered and facing defeat. They chose to ride off a cliff than be killed by the American soldiers. It is said that the women of the tribe cried tears on the mountain over their fallen men, and their tears turned to stone as they hit the ground. Apache Leap Mountain is where this took place, it located in Southeastern Arizona. It is quite beautiful there. You can read more about the legend here. Because of this lore, it is said to assist with grief and loss. 

Another beautiful stone for grief support is Dravite, or Champagne Tourmaline. It is a dark brown Tourmaline, and it is wonderful to help ground and emote. And also it is wonderful for self-care and self-love, which are two things most of find difficult in times of emotional struggle.

I am also fond of Smoky Quartz for grief support as it is a strong protector and grounder. Remember that most of our fears of emoting and feeling grief is feeling out of control, or that once we start crying we will not stop. These black stones actually help you feel safe, secure and allow you to emote. It also protects your feelings from others. Think of how vulnerable we feel when we are emotional or grieving. If we see a Hallmark commercial, we burst into tears. Well, these dark stones--Dravite, Smoky Quartz and Apache Tear--help protect your EMF and keep your feelings to yourself.

I also include heart stones in grief mojo bags or grids. Some great stones to includes are Rhodochrosite, Rose Quartz, Green Aventurine, and Garnet, which is not usually put into the mix here with grief, but I think it is a wonderful ally.

So, you have these stones, now what? I love to gift a mojo bag of stones to a friend who has just lost a relative, friend or pet. But grief is not limited to the death of someone. We experience grief when our marriage falls apart, or we lose a job, or get sick and face a new way of living. Grief experience should not be limited to one experience of grief--death. So, yes, MOJO BAGS! It is a great support. I also love to create grids for my friends who are experiencing grief or death anniversaries. And send them distance Reiki. I always ask permission (Number one rule of energy work!).