I was sitting down to a breakfast I’ve had for 15 years due to dietary limitations. The almond butter was arguing with me. It had been itching my throat lately, so I got the peanut butter and cashew butter out of the pantry. No, no, and no. Dry mock “toast” for me. I burst into tears.

I’ve been doing this discipline for almost twenty years, years of cooking and choosing what is good for this body instead of what is yummy, or what is on offer. Retraining my pallet, doing the hard work of unplugging from cultural conditioning of food as pleasure. I had achieved mastery, not even thinking about it anymore. Until this year, when I thought I was miraculously healed, symptom- free. I could enjoy pineapples, champagne, even occasional bread without ill effect. Until all at once, dramatically, I could not. No room for mistaking it.

Okay. No big deal, I’d done this before. But, then, it was.

The feelings came. First a dullness, a cloud hanging over me. Grief, maybe. Anger, not mine. Sadness. And they kept coming… Leading me back to childhood. My mother’s, grandmother’s food issues, food as control, as a way of coping with unhappiness. Memories, ancestral impressions surfaced…stories I know to be true, not because I was told them but because I can travel to any point in time, feel the energies of what occurred, feel their truths in deeper layers of my energy body.

It felt bottomless. Every attempt to tidy up a process with a resolution felt… never quite there yet.  It wasn’t about me, not any longer. Not my inner child. Bigger than me, more layers than I could consciously articulate. Waves of feeling, they just kept coming.

I looked at myself in the mirror, heard my grandmother’s exasperated turn of phrase (which made me smile), “Gravy! Why this? Why now?”

Indeed. I was doing so good! I was feeling so clear! Silence. Crickets. All I heard: Feel. My energy body has witnessed many energies in my 46 years, some of which I did not have the capacity to process, then. Well, I guess this is on the agenda for this week: Feeling it all.

In the event of huge swells, all we can do is set the intention to allow what we feel to move through us. An almost reverent level of presence is paramount. To oneself, to exquisite levels of self-care, and to the energy itself, allowing it to be without changing anything at all. Allowing it to show us what it is – as baffling as it is to our mental faculties.

This is what “energetic clearing” is.

You feel.  What is ready to be released.

What has been taking too much of your oxygen, obscuring your light, weighing you down.

Without judgment, without shaming, without thinking anything is wrong with you. Without interference of too much interpretation.

The world may call it: “feeling too much”, “crazy”, “wallowing”. My Cancer South Node (conjunct my Sun) has heard it all!

It’s not that. It’s energetic clearing.

It may be uncomfortable, confusing, even scary sometimes. But it’s not that.

It is a Divine unfolding, sloughing of what is not eternal but is also real.

For many of us, it is an ongoing process that repeats, by lesser and greater degree, throughout life. One that cannot be separated from who we are, how we are built. Who knows if we will ever reach the core? We just keep peeling.

It desires your presence. You as sacred witness. You as unconditional LOVE. To the abandonment, grief, sadness, the misperception of Light… your own, another’s, perhaps an ancestor that you never knew.

To whatever wants to come through, you are the vessel. You are the capable, blessed container.

Eventually, because you do this work, because you have committed to feel, to be present, and to heal… you know you will become lighter than you’ve been in a long, long while — since perhaps, when you were a child. But the light doesn’t come right away.

For now, you feel it all.

Allow. Accept. Feel. Acknowledge. Hold space. Love.

Let it move through you. For as long as it takes.

And… in a world that wants a logical explanation for everything, and likewise, does not want to take the time to feel or be present, you may be hard pressed to find examples of, and support for, this sacred feminine work.

So let me support you in this. I am here, with you. Holding space.

Pisces Full Moon Energy Practice: Holding Space

Pisces Full Moon is big energy. Jupiter in Sag squares this Moon, Neptune conjuncts, and Pluto trine. The energy feels both as wobbly and bubbly as a child’s bouncy house, and as sacred as light streaming through cathedral glass. Paradox is in the air, catch-22’s that baffle you. As are mysteries and secrets from long ago. Both are often revealed under Pisces Full Moons. You can discover wrinkles in time.

Don’t try and understand everything you feel or experience. Big energies do not need our words, or total understanding. Only our presence. Our witnessing. Virgo energies will try and figure things out, find solutions, fix, resolve, analyze. Just let go of all that, for now.

In spiritual work, less is often so. much. more.

The most powerfully healing thing we can do right now is to hold space for what is here. Without trying to find any resolution at all.

Here’s the practice: ground, root and center. If your head is “swirly”, you are in your head, you are not grounded, so be sure and spend a little time connecting with the earth and your energy body.

Be present. To what comes through. First, perhaps a sob, or a squeezed heart, or an icy chill, or a barely perceptible rage… Investigate it even more deeply. With curiosity and tenderness. With gentleness and relaxed inquiry. The layers are gently peeled, felt.

Set the intention to allow whatever comes up to come without judgment.

No one gets to have an opinion or weigh in about who you are, how you feel, or what your feelings might say about you… but you.

(take back your power, if you need. You deserve this)

Ask that what arises to return to Source/Spirit. Allow it to happen in its own time. It may take seconds, minutes, days. You’ll know when you feel your energy body shift, when more light is moving through you.

An unexpected moment of magic from a stranger: I was at my new gynecologist’s office. When she shared that she had just had breast cancer, both breasts removed, I broke down and shared, too. Eyes full of compassion she exclaimed, “Gosh no almond butter? Of all things. Unfair!”

I instantly love her. This is holding space.

This is Goddess energy. Acceptance. Allowance. Compassion. No judgment.

So incredibly liberating. This witnessing, this permission to BE.

In my experience, energy fully felt will set us free – as long as we hold our feelings with total and complete unconditional acceptance. The world becomes a bit brighter. Our energy body feels lighter. We have cleared space for more of our natural light to come through.

Pisces Moon invokes this facet of Goddess energy. Give yourself permission. To feel. To be present. To acknowledge and allow what is. Be gentle with you. There is no getting it wrong. You are eternal.