Alysse Aallyn

Tag: #DreamGroup

  • 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

      MEMORY – THE PAST

      If This Archetype Chooses You – Check your conscious/subconscious/
      unconscious/collective consciousness levels. How comfortable are you with the very existence, not to mention the depth, of all these levels?

      You Are Multiple People Blending Their Lives With Yours – Do you ruminate about past events? Are you haunted by what was done & left undone? Do you feel nostalgia for a past that never was? Do you have a favorite period in history or a fantasy universe that you wish you lived in, instead of this one?

      You are the Hero of Your Creative Saga – Accept your centrality in your own myth. It doesn’t matter what other people think – they are the bit players. Think of your past as a Quest Saga. What did you want? How did it change? What blocked you? What tools have you got at your command? Where do you go from here?

      Rewrite the Past – You absolutely CAN, but first you first must face its full horror and that effect on you. Generally, because we were immature, we didn’t understand what was going on, were co-opted by our persecutors and prevented from fighting back. Things are different now! The hardest thing to accept is that beloved caregivers didn’t want the best for us – they only wanted us to be just like them.

      “I Don’t Believe in Ghosts but I Never Met a Person who Wasn’t Haunted” is a very wise saying. What haunts you exactly? Or who? Ghosts are malignant – if they weren’t they would be power spirits, fairy godmothers or guardian angels. What malignancies from your past are out to get you and how do they make themselves known? One of Freud’s contributions was to point out that people prefer their neurosis – ie imprisonment – to liberation. Why? What’s in it for you?

      You Define YOU. Yes, you have scars – these are bragging rights! You have been through the wars! ‘Rewriting” the past means understanding what really happened, the limitations of those who surrounded you, and exploring your chances and choices today. Just because parents, teachers or “society” sentenced you to play a role, you can step out of it at any time. Buddhist thought is very helpful here.

      Buddha teaches that life itself is an illusion – a dream. It changes depending on how we think about it. In the present, inside your mind, you hold all the keys to your own liberation. Re-visit Pema Chodron’s Noble Heart and Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now to explore how you can assume immediate control of your life and your mind and turn your past into fuel to power your growth.

      Creatives Know Who They Are – Remember, you’ve got a purpose. You’ve got a future. You’ve thought about your past and worked out conflicts with a mentor and in your Training Journal.

      Creatives Develop A Sense of History – You understand that history is a spiral, not a circle – the same things do keep coming around but in a different form. You see all around you the operation of karma.

      Choosing Evil is Choosing Chaos – and condemning yourself to death. It can’t work out for anyone except temporarily. You understand the battle between darkness and light and you have committed yourself firmly to The Light.

      Creatives Are Storytellers – You pass the message on with your life, with your words, with your body, with your very presence. You have become one link in the unbreakable chain of Eternal Perfection and you will have your reward.

      Models & Mentors – “You never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory” – Dr Seuss

      “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things” – Cicero

      “In the end, we’ll all become stories.” – Margaret Atwood

      “Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining a task or actually doing it”- Yo Yo Ma

      #Haiku: No-Fault Apology

      Atone?
      Conspire:
      Delete:
      Rewire
      My memory and
      Yours; potent
      Fire.

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

      Dreams – Imagination

      If This Archetype Chooses You – It’s Time to Wake up! Do you look forward to dreaming? I like waking up in the early dawn because when I go back to sleep I can set an intention for dreaming – all the best dreams (and the most memorable ones) happen at the very end of sleep while you are coming up through the layers of sub- to semi-consciousness.

      Creatives Are in Tune With Their Inner Voice – Jung tells us that in your dreams, you are everyone. Every life you have ever lived and every life you will ever live comes to you through your dreams.

      Remember – As Creative, You’re the Pilot – Do you long for caretaking? Are you eager to give over the reins of your life to someone else? If so, your dreams are likely to become scary, unmanageable and unsatisfying. It is time for you to take charge of your power – to admit that you are in control of your own brain.

      Creatives Are Seekers – We are self-defining. Self-validating. We are on a quest. Creatives experience to the fullest the nature of having a self. Become alert to the possibilities inherent in this particular incarnation and explore. Feel free to release your imagination.

      Dream Journal – Start a dream journal. Date it, and write, “I want to dream about…” Fill in the blank. Be as detailed and specific as you can manage. It is OK to allow your waking mind to construct desirable dreams – great works of art got their start in just this way! You may hear a voice… someone from the past who discouraged your “day-dreaming” and wanted you to focus on your work, on the present and on them. Explore this memory fearlessly. It is not rejecting or “hating on” that person to disagree with them – there are certainly times when the priority is to focus on other things – but right now you are exploring your own brain and testing out its powers. Clearly that’s an important and necessary project. Gently take control from this Remembered Forbidder and say, “This is my time now. I am in charge.”

      Creative Danger – We all know the cautionary tale of Scary Guy Who Lives for Video Games and Doesn’t Have a Life. Do you secretly fear that the power of dreams and the pleasures of daydreaming will suck you away from Real World Competence? They won’t – so long as you are reality centered. Some people only dream of different outcomes, futures that are impossible – instead of finding workable avenues of growth and advancement.

      Positive Dreaming Deepens and Enhances, doesn’t evade reality. It’s just that reality is so much wilder – and we are so much more powerful than we can credit!

      Dream Group – Form a Dream Group with others to share the content of your dreams and listen to their fresh interpretations. You can even try Group Dreaming. Lie on the floor holding hands in semi-darkness playing drowsy music. Share whatever comes up. These are models for your future. Some of us believe this growth goes on forever – even after death.

      Models & Mentors – “I dream things that never were and I say, “Why Not?” – George Bernard Shaw

      “A dreamer finds his way by moonlight…sees dawn before the rest of the world.” – Oscar Wilde

      ‘You have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world”
      – Harriet Tubman

      “I’ve had dreams, and I’ve had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.” – Jonas Salk

      #Haiku: Human Clay Sculpts Angel Wings

      We’re all
      Dirt:
      Humble beginnings launch
      Celestial imaginings

    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 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

          Cherry Blossoms = Paradise=BLISS “Love the Magician”

          Finding your bliss: Cherry blossoms promise: “Good things to come.”

          Everyone’s Paradise is different. For some it will be just like church, for others it’s the eternal “fish-fry” described in Green Pastures.

          Some people say it will be a place without animals, enemies, insects or unbelievers, others say it will be just like Earth. Some think it’s an endless loving embrace, others say a “roll in the hay” with “70 virgins.” (Imagine that being appealing!)

          These ideas are understandably small and based on limited and very individual human knowledge. This makes Paradise a mental construct; some kind of an existence of all joy and no pain. We can almost barely imagine that. What we can’t seem to imagine is a Paradise where all participate; in other words, how can we feel joy if “wrong thoughts”, “impure behaviors” and “bad people” are rewarded?

          Jesus was asked this question and his answer sounds suspiciously like “get over it.” He told a long story about toilers in the vineyards paid the same amount no matter how late they showed up, just because the owner was so full of generosity and joy.

          Something to think about. I personally treasure the idea that Paradise is a place where “every tear will be wiped away.”(Revelation)

          Once we have faced up to our personal inadequacies, admitted the power of our global longing and contemplated the possibility of severance, are we ready to surrender to bliss? Cherry Blossoms guarantee that ecstasy is coming. But what is ecstasy – how uncomfortable will it be and how will we recognize it?

          Ecstasy is the blurring of our boundaries into the beloved. Time vanishes, there is only the ecstatic present. You have experienced this before. Disappearing in to the safety of a loving parent’s arms you felt connected to them in a galvanic way – you and they were part of each other’s being. This is the connection Jesus offered when he called God “Daddy.”

          A mature connection with the Beloved is even more powerful, because we get to be both parent and child, recipient and giver, all at once and in the same moment. What joy!

          Meditation: Long live the weeds and the wildness – Gerard Manley Hopkins

          LOVE THE MAGICIAN

          The Magician is a Capricorn
          Bleeding cock’s milk from nipples
          Pale like mine but
          Maler.
          Illusion, he says is memory
          Of things that should have been.
          Doves and rabbits he entices
          From sacred groves between my legs
          Placed by ruse, and freed by art.
          When he dies, passion turns his eyes
          To quarters.
          He hears the world but faintly
          Through his one good ear.
          The other turns to me,
          Safecracker’s daughter.
          Trust the magician, voices tell me
          He knows when to drop the dice.

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

          The Calla Lilly = FORGIVENESS “My Grandmother’s Ghost”

          “Is forgiveness possible?”

          In the language of flowers, the Calla Lily is forgiveness. Forgiveness is like coming home. It hypothesizes a place where the past doesn’t matter, mistakes are healed, and love conquers all. Sounds like heaven, doesn’t it?

          Soulmates create heaven for each other, but we can taste and enjoy it, now. Nothing is held back.

          Love requires that each desire the other’s “good.” There is no tiny part of us hoping for the other’s denigration so that we can rise. This means forswearing the Scarcity Mentality. We must believe there is enough love for us both.

          Love without status, without competition. Just closeness, forgiveness and togetherness. If a Soulmate keeps pushing his Beloved into position of Enforcer, Critic, Teacher or Detective, the relationship is under such threat its future is imperiled. One can hardly be forgiven until one stops being a danger to the soul of the Beloved and the soul of the relationship. We must commit to desiring the other’s good, and to demanding health and life for ourselves.

          When the Calla lily arrives at your door, not just forgiveness but absolution is in the offing. We know there can be no forgiveness for us unless we have learned to forgive others, but perhaps the hardest thing is to learn to forgive ourselves.

          We must even forgive God for the pulse of history and the electricity of circumstance, for the physical web in which we are all caught. Give up trying to assess who did what to who and why; letting it all go as your eyes turn to the future.

          There is no resolution in simply showing wounds or admitting wrongdoing; but there is healing available when we hold each other up in the light. But we have to want it. We must want to come home.

          How many times do we have to forgive ourselves? When asked how many times we need to forgive others Jesus made the quick calculation of “seventy times seven” meaning, “a lot.” If you think about it, you’ll realize we are going to have to forgive each other and ourselves a lot more times than that! Possibly multiple times per day for the rest of our lives. Don’t we have to forgive ourselves for constantly underestimating ourselves, for saying “I can’t do this” without even trying, for insulting ourselves and verbally (and for all I know physically!) Be a loving partner to yourself so that your Beloved knows how to love you.

          Meditation: We’re branches of the same tree – W.B. Yeats

          My Grandmother’s Ghost

          My grandmother never cried
          Emmie you’re a stoic
          Everyone admired her. That’s why
          She haunts us; pressing her face accusingly
          Against the glass beneath the stairs.
          On windy nights she
          Threatens God, maligns
          His angels; for the little boy who died
          Of scarlet fever; without once
          Calling her name; and the collie dog run over
          And the storm that forever uprooted
          Her wedding tulips.
          Mother shakes her head, says, “Poor Gran
          Will never be done; she’s got
          Too much grief to catch up on.”

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

          The labyrinth = COMPLEXITY

          “What’s the ultimate secret?”

          The Labyrinth draws us in, yet we are fearful. In the garden lies this ultimate puzzle – that for which there is no solution, because the Labyrinth keeps adding corridors toward – where?

          We don’t recognize that our longing for stasis is really a longing for death, so that if we wish to live, we must commit ourselves to the constant flow of fresh experiences, discoveries that train our eyes in new ways of seeing.

          The Labyrinth changes us at the same time as we demand – and sometimes succeed in forcing – changes from it. We have pledged to leave our mark upon it. Nothing shakes our certainty that this puzzle pines for us every bit as much as we yearn for it. Is your soulmate waiting in the center of the labyrinth? What if the labyrinth has no center?

          Soulmates have an edge; we have eyes in the back of our heads. Our sixth sense seeks the others out and once we join hands, we become a four-eyed dragon. Not only can our eyes see forward in time and backwards in history – but now we have the benefit of two Third Eyes – two seats of wisdom.

          Why does the Labyrinth keep separating us? Because labyrinths are a series of puzzles without answers – designed to educate us to embrace the next problem.

          You were just around that corner – now suddenly your essence has departed. The aura I counted on with certainty has evanesced.

          What happens if one day you look at me with a different face and I realize your brain – that Seat of Self – has been affected and You and no Longer You?

          And then there’s Bad Magic – the lies that draw us – or one of us – in – to live – however momentarily – in Crazy World. The defining feature of Crazy World is sickness. Sickness, death and hopelessness are cultivated as if they were precious plants. You know you must get out as fast as you can. Yes, you should try to save each other but you will both be lost if you can’t get the oxygen mask over your own face first and return the trustworthy flow of life-giving reality.

          Our brain, the thinking organ with which we confront and negotiate the Labyrinth – is a labyrinth itself – possibly the model for all the labyrinths to come, but to comprehend the vastness of the universe all we have is this tiny human brain. Even as Soulmates touch Third Eyes together to join through Literature, Science, History and Art with all the human brains there have ever existed, can we gauge the immensities of inner and outer space? We can, if we are unafraid of complexity.

          The further we journey, the more we see. Every “solution” posits yet more problems. Hold hands and don’t be frightened. Our simplified language will inhibit our understanding until we invent placeholder terms to represent the “unknown” – just as in math – so we can begin to imagine a way to place them into our calculations. Luckily you don’t need to know everything there is to know about the ocean just to ride its waves; but you do need to appreciate the majesty, the mystery and the danger keeping you afloat.

          Heraclitus said you can never dip your hand in the “same river” twice. Even if you dip for the second time just moments later, the water itself is completely different. We are all rushing forward and there is no going back. Soulmates rush on together.

          She

          At the heart of the labyrinth
          She sits
          Repairing
          Sores of everyday
          Occurrence
          Insults, slights, poor
          Choice of Words &
          Turns of phrase.

          From the heart of the pond she
          Heals the otter’s sorrow
          The bobcat’s grief
          Orchestrating cries of loons
          Into family symphony
          Forever exploring but
          Having home to come
          Back to.

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

          Thorns = The thief = DISPOSSESSED “On Being Disinherited”

          “Could you steal? Have you?”

          The rose attacks; you are cut, pierced. Thorns signify “Don’t mess with me or you’ll be sorry.” The Garden itself has the capacity to cut you to the quick.

          What if the garden itself is under attack? Ravaged? Despoiled? Extinct?

          Dispossession is much more complicated than mere loss. It means something we thought was ours isn’t. “Thorns” remind us of hidden dangers. Ownership may be quietly transferred behind the scenes, or they may convince you it never existed at all. What is “ownership”, anyway? Are we entitled to the Soulmate’s love?

          Entitlement of some kind is at risk. Property? Dignity? Expectations? It can be very modest; a chair, a single room, a blanket. Not yours anymore. Nothing you can rely on. We must ask ourselves; are those we trust to act for us are fundamentally untrustworthy? Who or what do they represent?

          Contracts dissolve. In a class based society we suddenly find ourselves divested, plummeting down, down to the despised and the ignored. This is frightening and disorienting.

          The rules have shifted; the law has changed. We are looked on as an interloper at someone else’s party. Now we are viewed as dishonorable supplicants in danger of capture and incarceration.

          Thorns remind us of a wider meaning; a warning that ultimately we can “own” nothing: everything we use is shared. Even our own body, this ship we use to forage through the seas of life, can turn against us, behaving in completely unpermitted and unfamiliar ways.

          Feeling dispossessed is a shock to the system. Hustle culture places pressure on us to take, take, take, grab or “lose out.” When ‘Thorns” appear in your daily meditation it means it is time to have some serious thoughts about the nature of “ownership”; what you want versus what you can have; what you can control versus what you can’t and ultimately, who you can trust. Who’s feathering their private nest instead of honoring a contract?

          How can you gain through losing? Does real freedom lurk behind these dispossessions? The hermit crab carries his house on his back. When he outgrows it is when he shops for another house. It clearly wouldn’t benefit him to be dragging two houses around; he wouldn’t be able to move.

          But some of us are so burdened with junk we’re completely immobilized. Yet being robbed not only isn’t any kind of relief, the sense of violation lasts for years. The only person who can rid us of our stuff is Us. We just must set to it and figure out what’s baby and what’s bathwater. It’s a lifelong process. But being light and free can be intoxicating and addictive. Maybe a contract needs renegotiation, or shouldn’t exist in the first place.

          Sometimes a Soulmate fails the test or sharing, caring and giving. Or we fail. Maybe it is just once, and after a recovery period we will be better communicators. But maybe, like the hermit crab, we have outgrown this particular shell.

          After all, we’re planning to end up with wings. Maybe once we’ve soared we won’t want to live any other way.

          ON BEING DISINHERITED

          These are the tasks
          Performed without feeling;
          The snipping the
          Slashing
          The shredding
          Bundling into bunches
          You are the remote ogre
          And I the crying child.
          Why do partitioned pieces
          Melt before they touch?
          You fear to give;
          I am helpless to receive.
          Imagine we change places.
          Would that explain
          Your fear of me?

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

          Version 1.0.0

          Thistle = RESISTANCE = “The thistle”

          “Do we really want love? Can we tolerate togetherness?”

          The thistle threatens, “Touch me Not.”

          It is inevitable that we experience Merging on some level as Identity Loss. This is the source of the power struggle which plagues, and should plague, all relationships: who’s going to drive this bus? (The answer is Each/Both/Neither. Power flows in, out and between, like the tide.)

          If “who will drive” doesn’t emerge into consciousness then the problem lies very deep and must be urgently addressed. It’s always important to keep in mind that one soul isn’t “absorbed” while the other “inflates”! That’s not how it works at all!

          For example, those who study the contemporary meanings of the word ”fuck” will be justifiably alarmed. If you are “fucked” you’ve been “taken.” You’ve been “had,” emptied, eviscerated, exploited. You are left worse off.

          One person is diminished, the other is a conqueror in this scenario. Soulmating cannot and will not happen under such conditions – both souls will be erased. Considering that sex is the glue that fuses souls, exploitational thinking is profoundly destructive. “Mated” is a much better term, but even that fails to encompass the transfer of self into a central Us that is so much desired, feared, dreaded and resisted.

          You desperately need each other’s pollen to ignite true fertility in the soul. Relax. Experiment. Allow the Other to instruct you in their Wildness. Offer up your own exotic difference. Join.

          #HAIKU: The Thistle

          Pry me out
          I fly back hard
          Invigorate world
          With wilder honey