Alysse Aallyn

Category: #GoddessFreedom

  • Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

    Rainbow – Serendipity

      If This Archetype Chooses You – You Were Born Lucky! What is the greatest piece of good luck you’ve ever had? Your parentage? Talents? Home town? Best friend? A piece of advice? A special teacher? Think about it. Have you ever been offered a piece of good luck you couldn’t take advantage of, but wish you had?

      How Lucky Do You Need to Be? Ever seen the faces of gamblers seated hour by hour at the slot machines, wearing special gloves so their skin doesn’t fall off? Seriously, who would want to be them? Is it luck itself that we give thanks for, or our ability to recognize good fortune? Perhaps it’s really just our ability to take advantage of a piece of good luck when we’re offered it. These memories have one thing in common- i.e. “ability”, which is not luck, which is YOU. Give thanks for these abilities. Let’s learn to develop “gratitude thinking”.

      Creative Challenge – A different way of thinking about fortune is not all the wonderful things that didn’t happen, but the terrible things that COULD have happened – and didn’t. In other words, let’s try adopting a “glass half full” perspective and see how far that gets us.

      Creative Danger – Now that you’re committed to the creative path, the danger is always the same – recognizing your power but giving control of it over to some other entity that almost certainly doesn’t have your best interests at heart. We’re usually not even aware we’re doing this. But when you want to “be lucky” what does that mean? In whose eyes? Let’s put ourselves firmly in the driver’s seat and take a look at the path ahead of us. Do we want to go there? Do we really trust these people? Or are we the dog throwing away a real bone to reach the illusory bone we see pictured in the watery reflection of Aesop’s Fable?

      Creative Opportunity – As we negotiate our mortal existence we have a unique chance to take advantage of serendipitous appearances and encounters. If we recognize it. Compare your path to the immortal framework of eternity and ask, How am I doing?

      How Did We Get Here? Turns out your map was only a suggestion.


      We are mapping as we go along. However, life is even more interesting, it turns out, than our imaginations.

      After the Storm – Comes the Rainbow! Every visible color – carefully separated out – forming an arch to give us a glimpse of heaven! If it didn’t provably exist, would we still believe in it?

      List Your Rainbows – Clouds may or may not have silver linings. Rainbows are a complete surprise – unconnected to the storms that spawned them. Write about the surprises in your life in your Training Journal. How many were nasty? How many joyous?

      The Universe Conspired – To bring you to this moment. You zigged, you zagged, you wound up here. Give thanks!

      Models & Mentors – “Serendipity is when you find things that you weren’t looking for because what you are looking for is so damned difficult”
      – Erin McKean

      “Steer Into the skid” – Alysse Aallyn

      “Here you are moving ahead bravely in spite of everything going wrong” – Rithvik Singh

      “Take advantage of happy accidents” – Vincent van Gogh

      “There are no coincidences” – Sigmund Freud

      #Haiku: Rainbow – Serendipity

      Happenstance –
      Fortuitous
      Chance; we’re
      Born lucky
      We just don’t know it.

    1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

      Danger – Risk

        If This Archetype Chooses You – Look out. Are you a worrier? Anxiety driven? Haunted by nightmares and worst-case scenarios? Do you wake up gasping and trying to forget what you’ve just experienced?

        You are Alert – Nightmares mean you’re paying attention. Life is scary, but we need to grow, and growth requires we learn to cultivate risk if we are ever to expand and venture outside our comfort zone.

        The Number One Complaint About the Freedom of Becoming a Creative? – Fear management. The only way to manage fear? Become a Creative.

        Study Risk Intelligently. No point being afraid of dragons if dragons are only symbolic. No point being “afraid” of “foreigners” if the man telling us to be afraid has a reputation for befriending people and then fleecing them.

        Managing Fear:

        1. Don’t rely on rumor and innuendo
        2. Dangers must be proven Real
        3. Dangers Need to be Historically verified by data: “How likely is injury?”
        4. Assemble likely risk-avoidance strategies that have performed well for others in your situation.
        5. What exactly is your situation? Quantify.
        6. Know who your friends are
        7. Be prepared to alter strategy to maximize success and to learn from mistakes

        Creatives Train – Creatives accept, identify and study the challenges. They learn to make sophisticated risk assessments and pick their battles cleverly. To do that, creatives need a Purpose. You get to find out who your friends are. Friends want the best for you, but the relationship must be reciprocal. You have each other’s backs. Know the difference between a Team and a Gang. Gangs work to suck power from individual members and concentrate it in one individual. Teams work for the success of all. Coach can’t win if the team doesn’t win.

        Creatives Test – their and mental physical abilities constantly against life’s games & mazes

        Creatives Transform – The physical pleasure of meeting the moment cannot be overstated. Soon the training itself becomes a rush of joy. You are making love to the universe and the universe loves you back

        What About Defeat? – There are no defeats, there are only lessons. Everything is practice for The Greater Contest.

        Won’t You Ultimately Lose? Truly, we all die, some sooner, some less dignified. This is where your purpose upholds you. Study your models. What allowed Nelson Mandela to be “captain of his soul” after more than 20 years in brutal captivity? Are we just bodies? Or are we also souls? Are our souls so easily defeated? Can we also train, test and transform our souls?

        Remember – a caterpillar’s “defeat” is a butterfly.

        Models & Mentors – “Extreme Fear can neither fight nor fly.”
        – William Shakespeare

        “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear” – Mark Twain

        “If you try to get rid of fear and anger without knowing their meaning, they will return stronger” – Deepak Chopra

        “We’re more often frightened than hurt, and we suffer more from imagination than reality.” – Seneca

        #haiku: Everything

        Everything you’ve
        Ever wanted
        Is on the other side
        Of fear

      1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

        The Path – Goals

        If This Archetype Chooses You – There Will Be Paperwork! – Do you dream of paths diverging in a yellow wood? Checklists? Maps? Are you talking to yourself as you follow your routine? What IS your routine? How has your routine evolved? What efforts have you made to change it to newly perceived needs and discoveries? Or is your routine formed outside your will, strictly for the benefit of others?

        Creatives Dream of Maps. If you talking to yourself throughout your routine that self-talk needs to be positive. Become an encouraging coach. Don’t hold yourself hostage or you can’t complete your steps.

        If You Have No Goal, Any Path Will Take You There – But you won’t like where you end up. Creatives are Goal-oriented. As you become more adept at change, you realize that dividing effort into “steps” to achieve a goal is critical. It won’t happen fast. Your conscious, subconscious, unconscious and collective unconscious (not to mention your pre-conscious!) are going to kick up a helluva fuss. But that’s the interesting part! Change is guaranteed.

        Creatives Are Sore-Muscled Athletes – Day 2 is typically spent thinking, I CAN’T DO THIS. Guess what? EVERYBODY THINKS THAT! Even the non-sensitive thinks it. Expect it! You treat yourself with loving compassion and cold compresses, hot baths and massage. In other words, there is an established map, a way to GET THROUGH THIS. The challenge is to CUSTOMIZE your map to suit you, exactly.

        Being is Movement. As we shape the Path, it shapes us. Even the most anti-social creatures are constantly making paths for others to follow. Such delight when we uncover a ready-made Path because path-making is exhausting! A ready-made path is a mysterious invitation. All paths lead Somewhere. Every Path, Visible or not, speaks of the existence of The Other.

        Paths Speak of Destination, Intention, Design, History. Paths are our Robinson Crusoe footprint. They represent Hope: this Path worked not just once, but many times. We are proud of being Path-makers, Ice-piercers in our turn, Long-distance voyagers. We lead the weary, frightened traveler of the future toward confidence and reliability.

        Creatives Use Models. We need a constantly evolving & revolving pit crew of helpers. A side effect of routine remodeling is “crazy thinking.” We all need somebody to talk us off the ledge, somebody who is familiar with not just our goals but what we are going through. Your id is holding the rest of you hostage, and you need an experienced hostage negotiator.

        Waves of “Fear” Surfacing from your Collective Unconscious require symbolic release and expression in art, dance, love-making, sport or theatre.

        Disowned Longings from Your Subconscious threaten your secure sense of self and may require therapeutic intervention.

        Unconscious Drives from Depths no one’s ever plumbed can’t be faced without the courage of a Friend or Soulmate. So, don’t try making it through this crisis without a buddy AND a coach.

        Halt! AA has a useful acronym – HALT – representing:

        Hungry
        Angry
        Lonely
        Tired

        These are the Emotion States of Bad Decision-Making. So, when you see these conditions developing – Halt. Call your hostage negotiator immediately.

        Models & Mentors – “Setting goals is the first step into turning the invisible into the visible” – Tony Robbins

        “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not people or things”
        – Albert Einstein

        “A goal without a plan is just a wish” – Antoine St. Exupery

        “Always remember your focus determines your reality” – George Lucas

        #Haiku: Facing the Boogeyman

        Mimics dread
        Mocks goals
        Derails
        Ambition;
        Seize him and
        Laugh
        In his face

      2. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

        Winter – Dormancy

        If This Archetype Chooses You – You are torpid. What’s happening when nothing’s happening? Your dreams remain lively. Do you thirst for endless sleep? Deep snows? Hibernation? Do you identify with the drowsy bear and the sleepy sloth?

        Now’s the Time – This is the sacred moment before a burst of Creativity. You are gathering your forces. Compare it to a pregnancy. Things are happening, but so slowly and deeply you are not aware of them, with the result that you may feel confused and frustrated. Instead, revel in this burgeoning becoming in the midst of sleepy peace.

        Creatives Need To Hibernate
        Sometimes a plan isn’t ready. Sometimes you’re not ready. Timing is everything.

        It’s a Long Wait Sometimes, as anyone who’s ever been through eighteen years of schooling or a seemingly endless winter can tell you. But it comes faster if you turn your attention to other things.

        Waiting for Peak –– We cultivate our dreams without pushing or extracting them. We curate our sensations without monitoring and forcing them. Spin through pictures of animals – what jumps out? Who is speaking to you? What are they saying? What are you afraid of and why? Make notes and collect images. A collage creates a deeper, more resonant picture. Sometimes it’s all in the eyes.

        Creative Danger – In sleep we are entirely vulnerable and we have cultural and historic reason to fear that state. Guard yourself with supportive beings, with sleep music, with healing rituals. The triple-locked doors, the blackout-curtained windows, the silenced devices protect us in our chosen nest. Don a bracelet of “worry beads”, summon your happiest memories and tell them by touch, eyes closed, one by one. Send every ounce of your remembered love and joy out into the universe with a command to come back to you a hundred times. A thousand times so that your love can spill over and be shared with all you touch, near and far.

        Creative Opportunity – You are creating yourself. The fetus of this pregnancy is YOU. In every dreamy hibernation second you are rebuilding yourself, adding visions, promoting fresh understandings and positive interpretations. Life offers us the chances of joy and misery – use your conscious awareness to accept these tools and allow dream-time and prep-time to penetrate ever deeper into your subconscious, (sometimes called the “preconscious”) to the unconscious, and down down down, deepest of all, to the collective unconscious where we recall in our bones and teeth and cells everything that has ever happened to every living thing as if it happened to us. This is the source of all imagination and creativity, accessible to you in the dream state.

        Be Patient. A Watched Pot Never Boils. The mouse is a whole lot likelier to come out of the mouse-hole if the cat isn’t waiting on the other side. Free your mind to imagine what it feels like to be everyone, anyone, in your constructed scenarios.

        Over-thinking is Bad for your Brain – Ever heard the expression “Sleep on it!” The only time you shouldn’t sleep on it is in the heat of battle, and the clever creative AVOIDS battles to protect their birthing self-hood. ALWAYS sleep on it! Ask your dreams to send insight, bubbling up from the pre-conscious. Participate in artistic pursuits, allowing metaphor and symbol to work it’s magic in your subconscious. Do something completely different. Refresh yourself.

        Models & Mentors – “To lose patience is to lose the battle.”
        – Mahatma Gandhi

        “Grow in patience when you meet great wrongs and they will be powerless to vex your mind” – Leonardo da Vinci

        “Patience is not simply the ability to wait but how we behave when we are waiting” – Joyce Meyer

        “Patience and Time do more than strength and passion”
        – Jean de la Fontaine

        Haiku: Ghosts

        Ghosts
        Enable, unmask
        All our
        Dormant selves
        We could not
        Would not
        Be.

      3. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

        Inspiration – Intuition

          When This Archetype Chooses You – Let’s help you find a way to hang on to those little ideas that keep flickering across your mind-screen. What inspires you? Are you waking up filled with exciting ideas you long to write down? Do you feel the potential of philosophical, profound revelations in your dreams which can never be captured in your waking state?

          Your Subconscious is Calling Out to You – You are experiencing a split between your Rational self and your Prophetic Self, a split which is not only potentially dangerous but completely unnecessary. Probably someone in your education blocked your inspiration by demeaning this interactive channel to the Collective Unconscious of Past and Future and warned you to ignore it. Often teachers think they are “protecting” us by claiming ignorance of intergenerational trauma, despising collective wisdom and its symbols. Education is a good thing when it teaches you to recognize, master and increase resources but it is certainly a bad thing if it countermands, neglects or destroys the yearning inside of you for a deeper connection to all of history and humanity.

          Creative Challenge – We can re-open this channel, but we will have to think about its potential in a more positive way. The great physicist said that all profound truths contain their opposite (i.e. are not dichotomous) and so require new theories about the Real and the Unreal. These ideas are not mutually exclusive. We must learn to flow with them, rather than fear & resist their bubblings of power.

          Creative Danger – “Either/Or” thinking is destructive because it requires we abandon access to vast methodologies of understanding. “Reductionism” reduces the world to “things” on the presumption that people are transient and “things” are more permanent. But if the magic of the universe encodes in relationships rather than objects this reductionism kills true discovery & thought itself.

          Creative Opportunity – Accept and ready yourself to explore your inspirations. Learn to separate them from fears and wishes. Cultivate your intuition, that precious gut instinct that warns us who and what to trust and who – and what – to back away from. Accept that – like all good things, this is a Process – thus endless (ie; to be enjoyed for all eternity.) Accept that it is a skill to be honed – one you will keep forever.

          Creatives’ Gut – You sense things. After you sleep on it, you know things. Develop these instincts through drumming, foot massage, chanting, meditation, whatever activities bring you “out” of your head.

          Confront Your Real Self – You can use a sauna as your own private ‘sweat lodge.” The goal is to locate your original self to ask its opinion.


          All too often people in our consumer culture seek a psycho-active product for brain “transformation”. You will need brain “purifying” instead. Consider the substances you fear being without. Caffeine? Nicotine? Carbohydrates? Alcohol? Pain pills? Consider trying to go without for short periods of time to develop your tolerance. Try intermittent fasting under the guidance of a responsible nutrition coach. Track your emerging thoughts in your Training Journal.

          Models & Mentors – “Intuition is the whisper of the soul” – Krishnamurti

          “A good artist lets intuition lead him wherever it wants” – Lao Tzu

          “Follow your instincts – it’s where true wisdom manifests itself” – Oprah Winfrey

          “Intuition and observation are the sources for our knowledge” – Rudolf Steiner

          Haiku: Inspiration – Intuition

          Faint voice
          Clear
          Harder you listen
          Heart
          Symphonics – re –
          Connecting
          World

        1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Bootcamp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

          The Storm – Conflict

            When This Archetype Chooses You – Something’s coming. Are you having bad dreams? Maybe about natural disasters like storms, volcanoes and flooding? Do you fear war, robbery, violation, home invasion? Or do you dream about your loved one’s face turning bitter and their words cutting sharply? Conflict is inevitable. It is even necessary – birth pangs seem objectively terrifying. In dreams, we rehearse our fears until some of us fear to dream.

            It Always Comes Before You’re Ready – Here it is – the reason you became a creative. To figure out, even if only metaphorically, what is going on. You will have to seize control of yourself to seize control of your tools. It’s battle or go under. The force against you is superior – no question about that – you must be wily and assess when to expend energy and when to conserve your strength.

            You are a Force Field. By virtue of your temperament as a creative you are a magnet for desire, change, for evolution itself. Others may tell you to stand back, take your place in line or wait your turn but your appearance into this chaotic universe triggered no such guarantee. We are here to learn to use our power.

            Conflict Makes a Creative – Force stirs up resistance. Actions create re-action as we swing back and forth in our determination and direction. We clash and crash. Sometimes we regret it bitterly, “why did I do that?” Sometimes we fear loss or harm so much we become immobilized. The challenge is to assume your stride, elucidate your goals and plan a direction.

            Creative Danger – It’s all too easy to make others fear you. The one with the biggest weapon THINKS he wins every fight. But what looks like compliance to you could be revolution – you will be toppled and lose your heart’s desire.

            Creative Opportunity – Learning to use conflict constructively and creatively is a Superpower. Other people are force fields, too. If there is any way to blend these powers and head in the same direction, we become invincible. Welcome the knowledge provided by the Storm archetype in your Creative Oracle deck.

            Study Your Opponent – Some clever scholar has separated these opponents into groups & classes. Read up! Some opponents – physical contests, weather conditions – don’t even have a brain. So who – or what – are you playing against?

            You Are Playing Against Yourself – your own fear, incapacity, beginner status. Seek mentoring so you have advice along the journey. Who is the sensei who will guide you? Someone who desires both your safety and your growth.

            Reward Yourself – The best place to do this is your Training Journal. Think hard about every contest and how you performed. Assess your challenges and accomplishments. Way to go!

            Models & Mentors – “I used to tell myself, boy, if you can survive this, you can survive anything” – Tom Lichtenberg

            “Laughter is the proof that our tragedies don’t define us. Laughter is the survivor’s language” – Josh James

            “Cancer didn’t bring me to my knees, it brought me to my feet”
            – Michael Douglas

            “If you want to awaken humanity, awaken yourself. If you want to eliminate suffering, eliminate what is negative in yourself. Your gift to the world is our self-transformation.” –Lao Tzu

            Haiku: Sleuth

            Named is
            Tamed.
            Brainstorm:
            Exceed
            Outstrip
            Surpass
            Unveil
            Lay bare
            Prevail

          1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

            Let Go of the Past – Don’t Worry.

              Can Creatives afford to relax? Seems counterintuitive right before a big project, doesn’t it? Well, First Lesson of Creative Boot Camp is that creativity is Counterintuitive. Other people rush away from the burning building – planning on being EVEN MORE SCARED the next time. Well, we are going to master our fear. We are going in.

              Consider the “Letting Go” archetype – swimming, flying, dreaming. Does it speak to you? You’ve summoned up your power – now you’re overwhelmed with fear – are we challenging the goddess? Insulting the universe? This is an age-old dread felt by every human that intended to accomplish anything since the beginning of time. You’re declaring your place in the world. Your past memories are of others firmly trying to “place” you and keep you there. Dismiss them from your thoughts. You’re alone now, with your own potential – and it’s the most exciting place to be in the world.

              Everybody Panics – I had my first panic attack at age 5 (I got lost outside a movie theatre) and another at age 11 when I descended deep, deep, deep into a cave. (I think the guide was deliberately trying to scare us.) I didn’t know at the time what these episodes were – my parents and sisters saw them as embarrassing annoyances – but looking back it’s clear what was happening to me physically was as a result of what was happening to me mentally.

              Relaxation In the Face of Panic – Learning to tolerate psychic dissonance, to be interested in it and challenged by it is what we’re all about. It’s a sign that we’re in the presence of the Deep Stuff – the things that galvanize our deep subconscious and if we can just seize control of that, we’ll access our true power.

              Learn Relaxation Techniques – There are so many and you should experiment with all of them! Learn what works for you and – key – what you enjoy. You will find yourselves using these techniques all the time. To get to sleep, to get through difficult experiences or just to access your subconscious when you have a question.

              Breathe Deeply – The very first thing is mastering control of the breath. Pregnant women learn all kinds of helpful breathing techniques in Lamaze; panting, counting; deliberately slowing down and speeding up your breathing. In yoga you will learn Lion Breaths to make you feel powerful. They are very similar to the gasps and shouts in martial arts and will affect your opponents. Watch the Maori war dance on YouTube.

              Get Out Your Training Journal – write down the techniques and your reactions. Appoint a time to practice these every day. Your breath connects you to the universe and all living things.

              Models & Mentors: “The first thing to learn is the breath.” – Confucius

              ‘Breathe In. Let Go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure, and give thanks for that.”
              – Oprah Winfrey

              ‘Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor” –
              Thich Nhat Hanh

              “While we breathe, we hope” – Barack Obama

              #Haiku: Every Breath You Take

              Life isn’t numbered
              By breaths you take but
              Moments
              That take breath
              Away

            1. Sleeping Orchid – Creative Boot Camp for Sensitives & Empaths with Alysse Aallyn

              The Goddess – Power

                When This Archetype Chooses You – Is this your archetype? You are one of the Elect. Most people feel that because the Goddess archetype represents power it’s the most valuable archetype in the Creative Oracle. But creativity builds over time, and power can destroy in an instant. We are well familiar with fires that get out of control, rage-fueled spirals, explosives that blow up in your face and escalating weaponry. How do we master such an overwhelming force?

                You Must Own Your Power – Accept that you have the force within you to get things done and to bend unfriendly circumstances to your desire and will. To others, creativity looks like magic. Accept that. Isn’t that what we all want – a little magic?

                You Are Iconic – But the Goddess archetype is about the inherent magic that is especially, irreplaceably You. You have a power no one else has, incorporated in your being, your possibilities, your desires and your memories. This takes a lifetime to accept because we all nervously want to be Someone Else and experience existence through the armor of Having only an Outside instead of just the very vulnerable Inside in which we all feel imprisoned.

                Dreams Instruct You – Your dreams bring all these passions together as psychic poetry, elucidating what you think you want, what you hope you want and what you are afraid you want. The ultimate magic will be to seize conscious control of this potent power source.

                Creative Challenge – The challenge is to truly connect with others, reveal our world Inside, and avoid blasting their apparently impenetrable Outside with our terror, our longing and our fear.

                Creative Danger – We cannot take hostages and we must never become a hostage. Freedom is a fine line to walk. If we wish to reach out, we must treat others with respect and claim like respect for ourselves. Accept your “experiments”; do not fear them but allow them to take you where you need to go.

                Creative Opportunities – There will be stumbles and terrors aplenty, also successes that LOOK like stumbles and terrors, but which we only realize on reflection were real leaps forward. This is why we must carefully assess our daily efforts without being harsh with ourselves. Speak gently to yourself as you would to a most beloved child. You are your own Most Beloved Child. It is not selfish to commit to this belief, it is simply placing the oxygen mask over your own face FIRST so that you can administer this life-saving force to others. Find someone with whom you can share your journey, without fear or judgment. This connection will teach us everything we need to know about how to connect with others.

                Fear & Trembling: Where would we get the courage to become creatives? Human history begins with an enormous fear of God or whoever is causing all that lightning, those earthquakes and striking everybody down. Killing small helpless, pretty things was meant to be flattering and propitiatory to this God (I don’t get it either.) then Jesus came with a message about how God was really loving, generous and wanted the best for us. We know how that turned out.

                Becoming a Creative: As children, we struggled to understand where we fit on the power spectrum. I tried killing a snake and experimented with bullying other children the way I was bullied. I didn’t care for it. The only relief was in thinking about, researching and understanding what was going on. My earliest researches, as for many children, were in astronomy and dinosaurs. The cold magnificence of the planets and the complete wipeout of the dinosaurs gave me a way to stand back from the immediate suffering of the schoolyard. I then moved on to the early Egyptians who tried to solve their problems through magic and art. The art was visually appealing and the magic was emotionally soothing.

                Pick Your Battles: I saw that most schoolyard fights were a reaction to the immediate suffering of pain or confusion, and that they magnified, rather than solved, those problems. There was a manifest holiness about this discovery. It rescued me from the torture of everyday life and elevated me to a plane where every other contributing thinker had already become immortalized.

                Study & Strategy: I read everything I could get my hands on in history and biography (research) and in fairy tales (magic). When I fell in love with the novels of C.S. Lewis and Rumer Godden, the world judged my taste good – when I discovered Agatha Christie, it did not – but it turned out everyone else was reading her too. Agatha is a short course on human nature (original sin) and a proponent of both the scientific and Socratic methods. She’s great training for a Creative. I wrote it all down in my Training Journal.

                Claiming Your Power: By the time you’re a teenager you can see you have some power – some mental, some physical. The question is developing it and finding appropriate gurus. Avoid the dominance/submission game.

                Keep Going – Recognize that you have been touched by the goddess and honor her by being grateful for the glorious gifts of life.

                Models & Mentors: “I did not deceive you. I permitted you to deceive yourself.” Agatha Christie

                “An Indian proverb says everyone is a house with four rooms – physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. Most of us live in one room or the other but if you don’t visit each room each day you are not a complete person.” – Rumer Godden

                “You are never too old to dream a new dream or set a new goal”
                – C. S. Lewis

                “You have to believe in yourself” – Sun Tzu

                Haiku: Wyvern

                My power
                Beast bristles
                Fire;
                Eats critics
                Guards path
                Sleeps in my
                Mirror

              1. Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

                LAW = “The Statue”

                “Vows”

                In the garden stone figures mock us and memorialize us. They can be reassuring or uncanny as if secretly intuiting our states of mind. We put them there to remind us – of what?

                Lovers make promises to each other. We do it spontaneously, offering ourselves on the altar of our own desire. We solidify our vows publicly in paper, legal filings, photographs, video, topiary, marble, even stone.

                What promises can we make and what promises can we keep? Do these promises allow space to evolve over time? At least we can answer that last question with a heartening “yes.” Our promises are not set in stone. We are not our statues.

                Soulmates are in tune with each other. We can feel each other’s evolving spirit, sometimes before the other even can. We know when the petals lose their glisten, when the wings droop.

                Did we make a promise to be “perfect”? We know this is not possible or even desirable. The only real promises we can make are to be present, to be honest, and to treat the desires of the Beloved Other as Sacred. But we all have boundaries and we must be honest about uncovering and examining those.

                Some can be broken and re-set, some can’t. Does that mean a Soulmate can be temporary? We are temporal beings, but someday we will meet on the eternal plain.

                #HAIKU: The Statue

                Rose-choked;
                Tagged;
                Sentenced by time
                I stand Mute.
                Freeze! I see you!
                Who has won?

              2. Butterfly Language for Caterpillars – Soulmate Seeking with Alysse Aallyn

                The Tree = ENLIGHTENMENT “My Beautiful Twin Sister”

                “You can if you think you can”

                Trees knit a garden together. Thy hover over us the way we remember helpful adults from childhood. They are the elders of our loving garden family.

                To be “awakened” is to experience life as it really is. Lots of people are repelled by this notion. Why bother to wake up when the news is so bad? Remain in the happy dream state brought to you by the Sackler family or some other pharmaceutical conglomerate, or by your favorite source of baseless propaganda.

                That lasts as long as you can afford their product. As every rube discovers, Happy Dreamland’s price keeps getting steeper until one day, you can’t pay it at all. Then you are awake and desperately uncomfortable, whether you like it or not, and the life around you has gone to shit. And not the helpful, fertilizing kind.

                A common approach to Soulmate-seeking is to try to find someone to join you in Dreamland, or to aggressively shop for a Dreamland you want to join. What these people don’t know is that Soulmates create their own world together; and this is a process that can’t be rushed. Seeing yourself and life as it really is begins by being very uncomfortable, but enlightenment comes eventually, and it promises real peace.

                The first improvement is to stop complaining about other people and all the things you can’t fix. Look at and into each other. And then it hits you – that simple thing we always “knew” because we’ve been told over and over: Love is the answer. (“Why Live?” is the question.) Take a walk… together. Look at the stars…together.

                Stroll through an art gallery…together. Every joy is multiplied and magnified and now the question is, Aren’t we lucky? Well, aren’t you? And the gratitude for the chance to live for even a moment in this spectacular universe comes pouring out.

                MY BEAUTIFUL TWIN SISTER

                Twenty months
                Made you the boss
                But my twin just the same
                I gazed adoringly
                Into your dark power.
                You braved everything
                Always being first;
                Parting airspace with your muscle
                To improve my flight – you
                Schooled boyfriends
                Husbands, children
                Teachers
                Bent whole administrations to your will.
                For my benefit you
                Deconstructed history,
                Logic, told me
                Who to read and what to think;
                Volunteering for a better world.
                Protester, Marcher, you
                Learned Amslan
                Just to empathize;
                Conquered mountains
                Just for fun;
                Shifting derailleurs, snowshoeing
                Surefooted through so many
                Frosty seasons. Inside
                You were just like me;
                Scared, hesitant, fragile
                Pushing yourself out there;
                A revelation of
                Impossible courage
                Giving me a lifelong template
                To admire.