Life, a love story #dreamhealing #dreamjourneys #seadreams

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photo credit: <a href="http://Image by WikiImages from Pixabay” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Pixabay

I have been tumbling backwards in my dreams. Returning to homes of childhood and their keepers. It is funny how the mind moves through the body and the body through the mind. There is a cycling through time that is nonlinear. We are spirals like the galaxy that holds us together. We are each tiny universes filled with cells and memories. The past woven into the present, threading into the future, spiraling inward and outward. We are each an ocean, contained and endless. Our waters swallowed into the membranes of our cells in one moment, and expiring in waves back to the stars. We are heaven and earth in one body walking the planes of existence.

Three nights ago, my bare feet found the sands on the edge of the sea. They walked endless shorelines, treading the line between solid ground and the sharp drop back into the vast womb of Mother Earth. My heart a tremble of fear and courage, yet I dared not step into the water. The drop too steep I knew the swallow would be whole. It’s no surprise that the Mother returned in other forms in subsequent nights as the ocean found containment inside the throat. Words still searching for air. How frustrating the spiral can be.

As the year turns into a new calendar, there is the calling to shed the worn, tired skins we wear. There is the calling to strip bare and return to the womb to rebirth the self new and fresh. Yet birth is rarely painless, nor is it usually easy. It takes concerted effort, a fair bit of strength, and a willing letting go.

I have been thinking of the excuses I hold tight inside the spiral. This false feeling of security in the futile hope that no more pain will ensue. No one really desires pain, yet the heart builds a fortress that splinters in the tearing down. Birth is always easiest when there is no resistance to battle through.

I think, perhaps, I should have dove headfirst into those dream waters, or let the feet follow the suck of the sand into the liquid abyss. Only then would I have known if the drowning would have swallowed my breath, or gave it back. Complete surrendering of our fears comes with trust, and the acceptance that death, in some form, will occur.

It is always, though, a love story. The question is, do we make it conditional, or unconditional?

Romany #dreams #poetry #pastlives

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Self portrait dated 11/1/78. Age 5

Romany

I went to Romany in a dream to banish ghosts

“Don’t you remember,” It told my mother

“We’ve been here before.” She thought

the road pointed one way. I, the other

Time erased memory and blurred definition

as a great bear loomed

in a land turned dark and filled

with ghosts. Confusion sought the beauty

of colors vividly defined

it ran through nightmare

slipping to escape fear, until I climbed

the beloved stones above darkness

and felt the joy of the gypsy

girl return

 

 

Finding Home in the Body #Yoga #PastLives #Healing

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I am finding my way home through the body. Again, perhaps, but the path always changes as we circle into untouched avenues of the labyrinth of self. There has been the lingering question of home as a physical landscape calling me back. I have labeled it Albion, or what once was Albion, but I have been lying to myself. It is not a mere physical place that draws the deep longing out of me, it is the pure, boundless joy of being.

It is true I find home in the stones that hold the memories of long ago. They speak to me of a time when the stars touched Earth without dimension. I have called it magic, because that is what it feels like inside of cells that have learned to forget. Yet, it is simply the true state of the boundless self that knows that the one self is home only when there is no self defined by matter, space, or time.

We can live attached to concepts of structure as we walk a linear path to a false destination that can never be reached, and I have found this path to be lonely. I have struggled to free the desire to gather the lives around me into my arms and dance us all awake before Earth destroys us in her need to heal the wounds we have inflicted upon her.

The ancient stones remember what we have forgotten and that is why they draw me home to where the hearth fire inside is kindled in a landscape that does not judge or reject. There is only the embrace, welcoming the return.

It is not enough to return, temporarily, to sites that hold the memories of truth. These places are not outside my physical doorstep where I find myself tethered to a life that feels artificial in more ways than I can count. There are thousands of footsteps between me and the stones that call me home. I go to them to return, then turn back again to this physical place I must call home as I search to define it in a language long lost to our tongues. Too often I feel the structure of  nailed together wood painted on the outside to keep the self contained behind walls as though the boundless needs protection.

At night I find the freedom I seek in the daylight, flying through the glass that looks inward and outward. I soar easily to the ceiling and will myself back to the knowing that this too is false until the molecules of division give way and rejoin in the opening. Why, I ask, am I allowed to fly boundless only in the dimension of dreams? Why do a live in a time that has chosen to forget?

Days stretch false minutes and I find myself speaking the rote words of the mundane least others think me insane. Sometimes, I ask out loud, “When will this nightmare end?” Because, I must admit, there are days that feel like nightmares. The computer screen pulls me into the vacuum of humanity’s created chaos and I become entrenched in the darkness until I pull myself back to present surrounding me. The living, breathing pulse of the now where chaos becomes a complicated dance of cause and effect; of shadow and light; of the endless cycle of life. Each moment passing into the next, asking only to be let go.

Yet, sometimes we must circle backwards to go forwards. I have found myself once again traveling through lives passed to feel the chain around the black man’s neck before it can release the body’s constricted voice. My womb aches with the rape of the priestess, and so many more that I am surprised that it bore life. I breathe in love to release constriction as I look at the fence of bodies stretching back further than the eyes can see. How long will it take, I wonder, to free them all? Until I remember this pain that becomes a memory for cells constantly renewing themselves need not find a home in my body that wants to remember only joy.

Outside the structured walls of my physical home, I am drawn each day to the weeds beneath the blooms. Digging these hands of mine into the body of Earth to release the tangles of life that suffocate growth. I am not immune to the knowing that life must be taken to feed new life. It is equally cruel and beautiful. This surrender of death to birth.

I find a harmony in the cycle I help to create. Sometimes active participation is required to free the ties that bind, and so I move this body I also call home. I listen to its urgings, feel the lick of its flames as they rise through the belly. Summer allows the shedding of shoes, and I walk barefoot on the body of Earth to feel her heartbeat and the knowing that I am her child too. My cells are made from her elements. Pieces broken to be reformed. I cannot neglect this vital part of me.

Chaos lures the mind to disorder and the body to dance free. Yoga has become a necessity for balance. If a day passes without the body stretching the mind free as it heeds the call of release, I feel the fires inside smolder for lack of air. It is not easy for light to creep through dense layers. Cracks must open. Air must be let in. Prana follows the breath into the labyrinth as the body becomes the dragon raising its wings.  And that is when the soul soars home to itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Onward #writephoto #poetry

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Photo Credit: Sue Vincent

Talk to me about silence

I can’t hear your words

A mind closed by fear shuts

the ears and averts the eyes

while the voice calling out

to be heard

becomes a child

waiting to be seen

[Futility]

Last night, I must have been

traveling backwards

on this road we share

Fear holding constriction

the voice buried between

your mountains

[trapped]

I’ve decided to take a new turn

to the place called “Onward”

It lies just beyond those hills

where the air is open and free

And the sun spreads her fingers wide

to trace the valley of shadows

back into the light

For Sue Vincent’s weekly #writephoto prompt challenge. If you’d like to participate, please click here

#writephoto

Recoding the Cells: A Healing Meditation in Poetry Form #notbroken #meditations #healingmeditations #yogapoetry #poetry #healingpoetry

A healing meditation for all who may also feel the call to rewrite their stories:

 

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Oh, my child, you are never broken

The light of you is whole, complete in itself

The darkness of the other who has desired to break you

is a denial of your light, but it is not you

Do not give way yourself to be broken into fragments

Gather the shards, and realize that when you heal the wounds

all that remains is the golden soul

Whole and complete in and of itself

So I wish to tell you a different story

A story about a soul whose origin has no origin

because she always was and always will be

She is life eternal

as all souls are

but she desired to live in the body of a human being

to learn the process of becoming

over and over again, in different forms

She named herself, and so she was

 the Light of Self as the Whole

She was never not whole

She was never shattered light

Trace her origins back to your birth

and reform a new story

See her whole and golden

So vast that there is no separation

between where she begins and where she ends

Take this story with you

back into the womb

Recognize the cord

is not a tie to the true self

Allow her to realize that any rejection and loathing

she feels is not a reflection of her light

It is not hers to own

or to take into her being as truth

Allow her to expand her light beyond

this place called rejection and lack

Allow her to turn the loathing into love

See it coursing through the cord

bringing to her the fullness of its nourishment

Allow her to leave the womb

and birth herself into the world of wonderment

Where all things are possible

and no codings of false truths exist

to take her away from her core of Truth

that she is love and forever will be

Allow her to feel this and realize this

as she discovers the temporary state of separation

through the physical body

while knowing the soul

is never separated from the whole

Allow her light to vibrate

in that wave of continuity with source

and forever ride it as a part of the whole

Unfolding #AGirlNamedTruth #memoir

I am still processing love

a father’s story offering a truth

different from the one I was raised on

I am still processing trust

and the belief in words

I am learning how to weave

a new history and to embrace

the parts that are broken

Time teaches not all things

will come back together

Union is a splitting of cells

that collapse into life

fumbling to find a self

I hold my belief in threads

my hands weaving something new

I can’t tell you about endings

the story is still being written

each line bends through me

working its way to the heart

Alethea Kehas 1973
A young father holds a girl named Truth

This poem was inspired by a conversation I had with my birthfather yesterday while we spoke about the stories inside and around my memoir, A Girl Named Truth. “In the photograph,” he told me, “I look young, but I think you can see that I’m not disappointed that you were a girl. I’m really sorry about your middle name. It’s not that I still wanted you to be a boy. I chose it because it is Gaelic and I thought it had to do with the earth, and you’re a Virgo.”

 

A Girl Named Truth

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a memoir

It’s not easy for me to self-promote my first published book, which I have held close for so long. Yesterday, a friend on Facebook asked me how long it took me to write my memoir, and I told her a partial truth. That I started A Girl Named Truth ten years ago, nearly to the day I hit the button to birth its release on the night before my 44th birthday two weeks ago. This is true, but the journey leading up to putting the words on paper is perhaps what is most significant, for it is a journey of silence. A journey that started at my birth.

Even when I was a young child, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Some may call this lucky, but it is also a bit of a curse. Putting words onto paper, even in journal form, always felt like exposure. It felt hugely vulnerable, like I was opening myself up to censorship in the worst possible kind. Instead, I wrote stories and poems inside the pages of my mind and kept them neatly tucked into the folds where no one could venture but me. Then, one day, after enduring two years of debilitating IBS, I decided I need to write. Really write, the words waiting, not too patiently, inside the folds of my body.

IBS, when looked at on a metaphysical level, is a disease, or dis-ease, of the lower chakras, or energy centers of the body. The first (in the seven chakra system) is found at the base of the spine, and is the energy center that connects us to everything around us. It is our root-center, or our tribal connection. When we feel disconnected from our tribe/family unit, or are wounded by our tribe, this energy center will be compromised.

Our second chakra, located directly above it and surrounding our sexual organs, relates to our creative fire. Here is where we start to form and birth our individual gifts. How we related to others on an individual basis affects this chakra. If we feel secure in love (in all forms), this chakra will be vibrant and healthy.

The third chakra, located in the middle of our abdomen, is also referred to as our power center. Here is where we assert our individuality. Those who are confident in who they are, without being aggressive, will express a healthy and active third chakra.

I am telling you this, because I had none of the above, and if you read my memoir, you will learn about why. IBS, being a disease of the lower charkas, is a red-flag that these centers are out of balance in some way. I didn’t know this when I decided I needed to heal, I just knew that I had reached the point when I could no longer contain the trapped emotions inside of my belly. Each night a storm raged inside of me, and on a deeper, more subconscious level, I knew the storm was fueled by words, and more importantly truths, that needed to come out of me.

So I began to write and heal. As I wrote, my body began to talk to me, realizing that I was finally ready to listen. As my bloated belly birthed each word that had waited so long for release, I began to learn, really learn, about the little girl inside named truth. I learned to love her and to accept her. I cried her stored tears and relived her pain. Her timid, quiet voice began to discover its strength, and together we realized we had a story to tell and share. A story, that although individually unique, is every’s story. The quest for inner truth is universal. I wrote A Girl Named Truth to heal the inner child, but I compiled and bound it into a book in the hope that it may help others heal.

Alethea is a writer and owner of Inner Truth Healing. Her memoir, A Girl Named Truth, is now available at Amazon and Amazon.co.uk. To learn more about Alethea, please visit her website, aletheakehas.com 

Clearing the Ghosts from the Closet

It was a one of those nights when sleep arrives slowly and is interrupted mid-dream, ensuring that you will recall the scenes upon waking. One of my children was worried about ghosts in the bedroom. “You clear them, don’t you?” I was asked. The room felt unoccupied to me, but some protective measures where taken none-the-less. Turns out a scary YouTube video that was supposed to be comedic had been watched.

As a result, the lights went on several times during the night, and each time I woke from a new dream that seemed unrelated from the one to follow it until I rewinded the night during daylight.

My dreams began in that popular place where magic is contrived. I was eating lunch with my mother at one of the park’s restaurants. She had ordered the double hotdog special because it also came with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for later. I munched the fries, uninterested in eating the hotdog, while we sat at a booth. Then, suddenly, I found myself asleep, and when I woke my mother was gone. It had all been a ruse, a trick, a way to leave her child behind. Still groggy  from the drug that had been placed in my drink, I searched the streets, knowing she would not be found.

The next flick of the light found me on a park bench, reaching out to hold an infant that belonged to someone else. The child was a harmony of light and dark, with symbols covering his or her head (there was, fittingly, no sense of gender). The mother generously allowed me to enfold her baby in my arms. They followed me home, and while the child’s mother and I sat on the quilt I had made long ago with my own mother, she told me that the bedroom closet was too small for what it held inside.

“I’m a builder,” she assured me, and I watched as she threw open the doors and let loose that which was contained. Shoes and clothes piled out. “There is too much stuff in here,” She told me. “And the location is all wrong. Suddenly my closet was being lifted in her strong arms until it found a new home. A complete reconstruction and expansion was in order.

As I moved outside of the bedroom to watch, I discovered a house under construction. Some rooms were finished, others held the frame of potential. My home, though, was vast. Limitless rooms unfolded before me as I traveled (actually I believe I was flying through) the upstairs hallways.

Once again, a light went on, and I found myself inside of another dream. This time, I thought I was someone else who was not me. A beautiful boy who wanted to be a girl (this is significant on many levels, one being that in this life, I as expected to be born a boy by my parents, but was born a girl instead). Here I was, inside this child, being told that my father wanted me outside by the pond with him. I felt resistance build within me, and the struggle to be free erupt into wings.

I was the child of Pan, running gloriously wild, racing up the trunks of enormous trees and into a house held within the boughs. I was weightless with wings. There was nothing to stop me from being pure joy, except my own fears. Before I woke, I found myself in one of those upper rooms, looking outside at nebula exploding into being. Suddenly, I tasted fear. Could I, I wondered, leave it all behind? The Universe was calling…was I ready to follow that birthing of light?

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Orion Nebula, Source: copyright-free-images.com

 

 

 

“Eamon” v. “Elizabeth”

Second in the series about the power of names and what we can learn from them.

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Where I was born

On August 30, 1973 a child was born inside the bedroom of a tiny house that looks like a milk carton. She was supposed to be a boy.

“Dave [my father] always wanted you to be a boy,” my mother often told me.

“I thought you were going to be a boy,” my father tells me now.

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All wrapped up its hard to tell the truth

She was given the name Alethea Eamon Fischer. Alethea for the truth that cannot be agreed upon.

My mother tells me she found the name in a book. My father, that it was from the 1973 episode of Kung Fu with Jodi Foster called “Alethea,” which aired months before my birth.

My mother tells me it was a typical rainy day in Portland on the afternoon of my birth, my father remembers sun. He’s the one who gave me my middle name. Eamon became my demon. As I grew this name fueled the fire in my belly and the hatred I tried to harbor against my father.

“He never really cared about you girls,” my mother would tell us. How could he, I would think, if he gave me this name?

When I was a child I longed for an ordinary middle name, like Ann or Marie. Like the middle names my friends had. When they would ask me what my middle name was, I would refuse to tell them.

I tried to hide my middle name until it was shared without my permission, on the graduation program at the end of the 6th grade. There it was for everyone to see, beside my misspelt first name. “Eamon.”

No one said anything until the 8th grade, when I heard it sung down the hallways from the voices of boys becoming men. Each splintered note stabbed my heart and flared the fire in my cheeks.

It was a tool of hatred, of shame, of regret. My father’s gift to remind me I was the boy he didn’t get.  It was the demon I held inside of me, reminding me why I shouldn’t love him. And it was the knife that stabbed through my thinning layer of self-esteem wielded by my former best-friends’ boyfriends.

I couldn’t wait for the day to come when I could get rid of it.

When I was 18, my mother, sister and I booked the appointment and spent a pleasant afternoon debating our choices. We settled on Elizabeth for me. My maternal grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s name. Elizabeth, one of those names that any girl might have.

When  I signed the paper with my new name I thought I was erasing the boy that was never born. I thought I was one step closer to erasing the man who I thought never wanted me. A father who never could have loved me.

I was wrong.

 

You Can Leave it all Behind

Behinds and Baggage
Behinds and Baggage

I was looking through photographs, hoping for an image of baggage and hit the jack-pot when I stumbled upon this one. Baggage and behinds. Perfect! The idea that these kids (mine) were waiting for the school bus, also seemed to fit with the message I was going for. I couldn’t resist.

But this is a post about dreams, in the broadest sense of the word, and for quite some time I’ve been having a dialogue with my dream-self in an effort to shift my realities both at night and during the day. As many of you probably know, I’ve got a manuscript that’s been sitting in wait for awhile that I’d like to have published. There’s another one in the works. The finished one I wrote out of a need to heal myself, realizing as when I finished, that it had a universal message about voice and truth that applies to, well, just about anyone.

So, there’s this theme of healing and writing. They both, in my opinion go hand-in-hand. I I write to heal. I heal to write. This is a big part of my life’s journey. I’m here to incorporate both gifts in a life that involves truth, freedom and letting go of entanglements.

For those of you on a similar journey of healing, you will know that entanglements are of the self, and therefore it is up to the self to release and set free. Easier said than done. We cling to our baggage like we would cling to a life-raft at sea. Well, I do anyway.

If you were to flip through my dream journal, you would see a reoccurring theme of baggage. Our dream-selves love to use symbols and metaphors and some are rather blatantly obvious to get the point across. Quite frankly, though, I had had enough of these dreams about baggage. It was almost a guarantee that I’d go to sleep at night only to be immersed and a scene of frantic search. Usually I’m about to embark on, or leave from, a journey, and I’m in a frenetic race against time to collect all of my baggage in the form of clothes and various belongings I think I need for the trip. Things are often scattered in a cluttered room. There is too much of what I am looking to take with me. There is not enough time to collect it all. Heck, sometimes I’m even trying to wear it all. Crazy, I know. But, telling.

These last several nights I’ve been having a dialogue with that dream-self who is holding onto the idea of necessary baggage. “Give me a new reality,” I tell her each night before I succumb to slumber. For several nights I’ve refused to record her dreams, rebelling against the repetition of messages. “Show me a new reality.” And, last night, she did.

The funny thing is, I almost forgot the dream, and then I remembered.

It began as it typically does. The chaotic search for my hotel room and the things I think I need to take with me. I won’t bore you with the details, but it sure did seem to drag on endlessly. Then it shifted. There I was outside, doodling on a pad of paper, while a spirit guide with an Irish or British accent (hard to recall now) chattered in my ear. I glanced across a dirt road and saw belongings piled under a tree. They were not scattered or bagged, just a small pile in wait. A test.

“You know, you can leave it all behind,” she told me. And so I did.

It was effortless. Easy. There was no turning back. I simply left it. The female spirt guide became the physical manifestation of a man, who reminded me of the character Kane in the ’70s TV series “Kung Fu.” (For those of you who don’t know, I was named after the Jodi Foster guest character in an episode called “Alethea” that aired before my birth in 1973). I followed this Kane-like figure across the countryside and found myself without a scrap of baggage on me. Together we dove inside a hillside cave where a wondrous home was unveiled to me. Picture Dagobah mixed with Tatooine mixed with a Shaolin Temple on steroids and you’ll have an idea of what was offered to me. Suffice it to say, it was glorious. It was so worth it.

When we “leave it all behind,” we open the door to the magic waiting. Leaving the baggage of our pasts behind does not mean that we will forget that we had it. The life events still shape who we are. We learn from them, knowing that someday we will no longer need to hold on. When we strip bare the trappings in a bold release of freedom, we realize that what we thought we still needed was just baggage weighing us down. It has nothing of value, only the lessons we take with us, which are weightless. Last night I became The Fool in tarot, starting again at 0, only, unlike the fool, I carried nothing with me.

You Can Leave it All Behind
You Can Leave it All Behind