Alysse Aallyn

Tag: Memoir

  • Purrsiflage – Your Inner Cat Horoscope for 2026 with Alysse Aallyn

    Christmas Day

    Your Christmas Gift Is – You Were Born Lucky!  Let’s consider. 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 opportunity to take advantage of a piece of good luck when we’re offered it. These memories have one thing in common- i.e. the “ability”, which is not the luck, the luck is YOU. Give thanks for yourself and your abilities. Let’s learn to develop “gratitude thinking”.

    Purrson 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.

    Purrson Danger – Now that you’re committed to the Purrson path, the danger is always the same – recognizing your power but possibly ceding control over it 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 even mean?  “Lucky” 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?

    Purrson Opportunity – As we negotiate our mortal existence we have a unique chance to take advantage of serendipitous appearances and encounters. If we can recognize them. 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

  • Purrsiflage – Your Inner Kitty Horoscope with Alysse Aallyn

    Dec 23

    The Universe Has a Warning For 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 Purrson? – Fear management. The only way to manage fear? Become a Purrson.

    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
    • Dangers must be proven Real
    • Dangers Need to be Historically verified by data: “How likely is injury?”
    • Assemble likely risk-avoidance strategies that have performed well for others in your situation.
    • What exactly is your situation? Quantify.
    • Know who your friends are
    • Be prepared to alter strategy to maximize success and to learn from mistakes

    Purrsons Prepare Because Cats are notoriously wily. Purrsons accept, identify and study the challenges. They learn to make sophisticated risk assessments and pick their battles cleverly. To do that, Purrsons 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.

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

    Purrsons 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 in startlingly less dignified ways. 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

  • Purrsiflage – Your Purrson Horoscope for Today with Alysse Aallyn

    Dec 22

    Today The Past Consumes You – Is this a good thing or a bad one? 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 Lives – 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 Purrson 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.

    Purrsons 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.

    Purrsons 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.

    Purrsons 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

  • Purrsiflage – Your Purrson Horoscope with Alysse Aallyn

    Dec 20

    Today the Universe is telling you – You are torpid. What’s happening when nothing’s happening? Your dreams at least are lively. Do you find yourself thirsting for endless sleep? Deep snows? Hibernation? Does your Purrperson self identify with the drowsy bear and the sleepy sloth?

    Now’s the Time – This is the sacred moment before a burst of Purrson -hood . 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 your current state of sleepy peace.

    Purrsons 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.

    Purrson 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.

    Purrson 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 your 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 Purrson 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

  • The Book of You – Haiku Diary by Alysse Aallyn

    #Haiku: Power Incarnate

    Your

    Brave,

    Burnished; brutalized

    Carapace.

    Manifest.

    Gaze.  Accept.

    Love.

  • The Book of You – Haiku Diary by Alysse Aallyn

    #Haiku: Wherever You Go, There You Are

    Forgive

    You –

    Befriend

    Yourself;

    Mother –

    Lover –

    Hero –

    Coach –

    Be

    Worth it

  • The Book of You – Haiku Diary by Alysse Aallyn

    #Haiku: The Gazing Ball – Prophecy

    Inward

    Resonates outward;

    Warriors

    Blossom

    Inevitably

  • The Book of You – Haiku Diary by Alysse Aallyn

    #Haiku: Every Book is a Zen Book

    Puzzle

    Words –

    Assume

    Solution –

    Labyrinths

    Demand

    Escape;

    Look

    Up

  • The Book of You – Haiku Diary by Alysse Aallyn

    #Haiku: The Chrysanthemum

    Civility is

    Buried treasure

    Unearth with care

    Apply freely

  • The Book of You – Haiku Diary by Alysse Aallyn

    #Haiku: The Thistle

    Pry me out

    I’ll fly back stronger

    Flavor your world

    With wilder honey