Poetry unfurls your dreamworld --- original audio

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So for those of you who are just joining this week, I invite you to checkout the last four episodes where I go through the arc of this journey that I'm hoping we will collaborate on, when I launch this offering, Illumi9ate. This offering is for folks that I'm calling light-bearing leaders who are, you know the people that are able to really show up for others and show up with care and leadership and to support the growth and journeys of the people around them, while struggling to shine a light on their own dreams and themselves. This program is for you if you are a light bearing leader who is also making some kind of bold move towards being the free architect of your creative life. And, you want to do this because you aren't willing to be boxed into any kind of oppressive systems or institutions that demand that you dim your light.

Maybe you are taking a leap towards entrepreneurship. Maybe it is making more space for your creative life. Whatever that is, there is a sense of fear and freefall feeling that a transition like this tends to entail. This program is aimed at equipping you with the tools and practices that are going to enrich, clarify and soothe this transition for you. It is be a four part journey where we will investigate and release illusory fears and thought prisons that attempt to keep you stuck or small--- so you can remember and reclaim your dream, playful, creative self.

We've been on this journey, in the last five weeks. First, defining who light-bearing leaders are. Then I talked about the role of astrology in dismantling the limiting beliefs, thought prisons and patterns of anxiety that keep you stuck in loops— by zooming out and getting a cosmic view of your own map that exists for the understanding the patterns that hold you back and learning where those challenges can be turned into gifts. From there, we go into feeling into the sense of grief that often exists and loss that exists around your ecosystem and communities and not entirely feeling like you belong somewhere, and what role the Tarot can play in dropping you into an ecosystem that you have always belonged to. And then we traverse into the dream world. And we're kind of in the manifestation part of the dream world in this part of the journey. Last week, I talked about Human Design and the possibilities it can open up in taking that dream and supporting the how of that dream. What ways can you channel your energy and your resources so that you can continue to sustain the dream coming into reality?

This week, we get into poetry, where we're really going to feel into the sensory experience and the blueprint, if you will, of your dream inevitably coming into fruition.

So, poetry has been such an influential force in my life for a very long time, especially in the last, almost two years. And I wanted to bring to you, this quote from Audre Lorde's essay, Poetry is not a Luxury, that is in the Sister Outsider collection, but I believe was first published in 1977 in Chrysalis, a magazine of female culture, Number 3.

Okay, so if you stop this episode and all you do is go and read this essay, you will get what you need to get from this. But if you choose to stay, I'm going to bring excerpts from this essay into the storytelling of how I have gone from being disconnected from my own dreams of being an artist and a writer and a poet, to being in playful experimental practice in relation to it. And also how engaging in poetry in the last two years has shown me the power of having language to describe the worlds that I am building even when it feels far away and being able to bridge it by just dreaming up some language for it. Right now, I'm also feeling into how all of those poems have really shaped and changed my reality, and I'm kind of mind-blown.

So going back to Audre Lorde, there's a quote from this essay where she says, "I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile wordplay that too often our white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean, in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight." So powerful. I want to bring this particular quote in to kind of provide a working definition of poetry that we're working with here.

"Poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not sterile wordplay.." I'd like to speak to this for just a moment because often, I talk to people who aren't super drawn to poetry or feel that they can't read poetry because it's too hard to understand. And I feel this myself because I definitely felt like I was in the same boat. I didn't feel that I had a very good sense of poets or poetry that I was really drawn to. When I did find such poetry, I was often stumped by not being able to fathom or understand what was going on. A lot of poetry that I read growing up was definitely by white men, Robert Frost comes to mind. And even though those those poems were influential in my life, it's just.. in the last few years of my radical liberatory journeys, it's been a bit distant for me.

Sometimes in retrospect, I am like, this stuff has always been around me. But when I did read poems from people whose work I wanted to connect to, I still found a little bit of a gap in being able to parse or understand it in the first place. And there are.. I have learned over time that there are ways to break it down and learn these things such that you can understand, that could be part of the work we do. But let's go back to this "revelatory distillation of experience, not sterile wordplay" notion, where what we're talking about is not cleverness with language. What we're talking about is the inherent ability that you have irrespective of whether or not you want to be a poet or you consider yourself a poet --- to be able to draw from the deep dark well of your own experiences and then build a bridge from there to the worlds you imagine. And that's what Audre Lorde's essay really goes into. So, like I said, highly recommend reading it.

With that definition, let's go into my own story here with poetry. In March 2024, I was recovering from top surgery. I was quite devastated and depressed due to some post surgical complications, but also the end of friendships and collaborative artistic projects that were all dissolved just before my surgery. And I was feeling really raw, and I was starting to realize how I had focused my artistic practice on realizing other people's dreams, or on trying to tailor it towards some kind of external validation of my art from sources that were outside of me. I was starting to get honest about my own role in those relationships and collaborations and how I had deprioritized my voice as an artist. And how I had withdrawn my belief in my own dreams in order to feed into others' dreams, because I felt that they were somehow more worthwhile or more possible.

It was a time of waking up from an illusion and into my own vision, and it felt very far away at the time. It felt like I was starting over. It felt like I had wasted my time, and yet I could tell that it was a new beginning. It wasn't gonna be easy, but from this place of just really coming in contact with how far it could go when I wasn't in touch with myself. Feeling into what could happen if I did prioritize myself, one of the first things I did in this process was to sign up for a poetry class, which I have talked about before on this podcast. And I had this phenomenal opportunity to study with Tyler Pennock who was my poetry teacher in a continuing ed class called Writing Poetry at University of Guelph. And at the time, I was like, there is something that people know about poetry that I don't know because I feel like when I write poems, it was too raw. On the practical side, I kept telling myself, no one will publish my work. You know? So there was that, that was kind of feeding into it, the sense of, what do people that get published know that I don't know?

There was also the sense of I'm reading poems, but I'm not fully understanding how people arrived at the the kind of form that they're using, especially with more, modern or postmodern poetry. I was really confused as to what was going on. Like, in one of the poems that I had read.. I had bought this book that was a collection of poems published for the Griffin Poetry prize. And I read this beautiful poem by Layli Long Soldier where the poem was in the shape of a square. And I though, oh, wow, people who win poetry awards.. this is how they do it, by making poems in squares! Jokes aside, it was truly a mind blowing poem, and I was like, how did they get here? You know?

While I had this kind of inquisitiveness and thirst for knowledge coming into this class, I was also very disillusioned from my history community spaces. So I didn't know what to expect, but it was honestly one of the best community experiences I've ever had. Who knew that I was going to be opened into a world of poetry that was so palpable, so close to me, so much around me. I had been reading this essay before this for years, and yet I needed that invitation and the introduction to really open up into poetry, as a way to connect parts of myself that I held really disparate until that time.

A lot of times when I would go to open mics or things like that and listen to poetry.. One, I found it very hard because I don't process very well just from listening, but I also felt kind of out of place. I was like, oh, these folks are reading poetry about nature or their dogs, and I'm not feeling anything. I'm not feeling anything because there is so much going on in the the politics of the world, whether it's present or ongoing, and none of that seems to be represented. Or it would swing to the other end of the spectrum where, there's poetry that is really raw and angry, and I was definitely making some of these poems myself where I would write from a place of my raw emotional experience. And even if it was powerful sometimes and it would make me feel things to either listen to these these poems or to read my own, I felt it was too raw. It was too close to me.

I could remember every single word that I wrote, and when even when people would give me feedback on my poems, it would be about me. They would say things like, oh my god. I can't believe you went through that. I'm so sorry. And I'd be like, well okay, cool! But that's not why I wrote this poem. Like, there's a point underneath it. But because of how I was showing up to my work from this very raw place, that was being reflected back to me when people were reading it.

So what I really learned in Tyler's class from reading amazing poetry and talking about it with this supportive group of peers in a facilitated container, reading poets like Dionne Brand, whose work the Blue Clerk, really fundamentally shifted my understanding of what it means to be a poet. Reading Magnetic Equator by Kaie Kellough, which is such a phenomenal, collection of poems. So many more poets. And my classmates, one of my classmates was was published this year. I think I shared their book, Non-Prophet, a while back—Qurat Dar, Such an amazing poet.

What I really learned in this class, if I had to really distill it, was the process of creating a little bit of distance and perspective to be able to look at the deep, dark, emotional, vulnerable, experiential places of my life. And instead of just throwing all of that on the paper and calling that a poem, what does it look like when you have the perspective to be able to transmute that experience into a creation that isn't just about you, but is able to invite the reader into their own felt experience and leave them ultimately altered—because they got to experience and bring their own self into your art.

I learned the difference between journaling and making art. And I don't wanna take away from the creative power of journaling. What I'm saying is, that journal where your raw experience lives can become the foundation--- when you do have some distance, when you are connected to your politic, your values, your dreams, your visions, to be able to take what came from the raw place, and make something that is beautiful, real, and has the power to offer an experience that is going to fundamentally shift and shape reality itself. This is where the liberatory possibilities of poetry start to show up. I'm going to go back to Audre Lorde who says,

For women then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our experience. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening except as they came after dreams and poems.

This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of it feels right to me. We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not exist yet, it is our poetry which helps us to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision. It is the skeleton architecture of our lives.

It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Wow. Every time I read this essay, it hits deeper and deeper. What happened for me from the process of being in that class and making these poems, One, it showed me how like I said, there were these disparate parts of myself, including the parts of me that say, was going around walking around in parks, taking pictures of trees and learning what their names were. I would spend time outside just looking at clouds, for instance. And when I started to read these poets, I saw how integral the act of observation is to poetry, how I was already doing that and how it was going to become an even more enriching gift in my artistic process.

But like we said, we're not talking about "sterile wordplay". We're not talking about just going into nature and recording our observations, what we're talking about is— how do we practice feeling?

How do we practice presence?

How do we practice existing in our body, in our sensorium, in being connected to our senses in feeling and breathing with the trees around us. In feeling with the waves that the ocean brings and withdraws, in breathing alongside the birds that are chirping outside your window, in feeling the joy of the moss that grows on trees, of the mud that is outside my window right now.

(We're talking) of dropping into a time space that is attuned with cycles of Earth and nature and the cosmos that do not accept bondage from any colonial capitalist definition of clock time.

In that liminal space of feeling and presence and body orientation, that's where this "poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience" in Lorde's words lives, in my experience at least.

Living in this world where it is so easy to be caught up in our mind---everything from the attention economy and how much we are on social media, on the Internet, consuming things, reading or scrolling or watching TV or or whatever it is. But all of these, even though we need all of these things, there's this sense of being, so caught up in the mind loop of it all that weren't we're not really feeling, and that is by design.

Because emotions actually exist in slower time, it's not possible to just rush through them. You have to be able to allow for that wave of emotion to go through you. And when we do that, when we experience those feelings, when we allow us to open into those harder places or joyous places because there can be good feelings too.. From that place, our imagination can start to open up, and our imaginations are a dangerous thing to capitalism.

Our dreams are dangerous to capitalism, and so our feelings are dangerous to colonial capitalism. We don't feel, we don't dream, and we keep subsisting in what capitalism wants us to believe are the limits of our worlds.

But the moment we start to feel and start to connect to your erotic, those deep places of desire and start to get emotionally honest from these places, your true power, your dreams, and your imagination all start to bubble up and open you up into these possibilities that you didn't entertain before.

In these past few years, I wanna say since 2018, especially since Uranus transited into Taurus, which is an earth sign of survival and growth and nourishment and pleasure and being in our bodies, and Uranus being a planet that brings lightning like change and revelation---revelation of distilled.. "Poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience." It's so Uranian and Uranus in Taurus, when I go back and read these words in this context. Uranus has been going through Taurus since 2018, and it will be done with this, cycle in April 2026. And so it's doing its last stint in Taurus.

And in this time, something that we can observe in the world at large is how much we're talking about our nervous systems and somatics and our body and pleasure and rest and the reclamation of these really fundamental aspects of our being in this planet. We're coming into this kind of transformation that is happening in this realm. And there are a lot of trauma healing and somatic technologies that have become really popular from polyvagal theory to I'm forgetting the name of, it'll come back to me. (Edit: it did! Somatic Experiencing) Anyway, so I wanted to connect that dot because today (Dec 10 at 11:59AM PT), we had this transit happen where Mercury is in Scorpio, sitting in a place of emotional depth and vulnerability and opposing Uranus in Taurus at the very end of the sign, sitting in a place of what we reap and how we support the growth and flourishing of ourselves and our ecosystems and pushing for the transformation that is necessary for that to happen.

To me, poetry sits beautifully in this space. It provides us a path for manifesting our dream worlds through reclaiming our body, pleasure, time, and senses.

I was thinking about the poems that I made in my class in May 2024 and how each of those poems.. for instance, I made this poem that was about trans bathrooms and my experience of trying to choose between bathrooms and what it would be like if we could just have trans bathrooms. This was a dream that I had. And recently, I moved to a new place, and the town that I'm in has these bathrooms that just have, a mermaid and something else (edit: a rancher) on them. And it just says, "Whatever, Just wash your hands" or something like that. And it was like, yeah. This was part of my dream. You know?

Not the entire dream. But this poem was about this notion of having to choose between a bathroom where you're supposed to wear pants or a bathroom where you're supposed to wear dresses. If you think about the symbols of the bathroom, that'll hopefully make sense.

I was also thinking about an exercise that I did in my early days of Seeda School, where we did this kind of imaginative dreaming exercise of trying to write down what it would be like if you were at an artist retreat and what you would be doing, what what would that look like, feel like? It was very poetic. And by that, I mean, it required you to really get in tune with the sensory specifics and your imagination and your deep desires in order to write this. And I'm now living in a place that could pretty much be exactly described in the same way that I imagined a year and a half ago. It's not like I consulted my imagination in order to find this place. But, like I said, poetry creates this blueprint for us to show us where we're going.

I'm going to wrap up here with a final quote from this essay, Poetry is not a Luxury. At the very end of this essay, Audre Lorde says,

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive, kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes. Feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men, but women have survived, as poets. There are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

If what we need to dream to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core, the fountain of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7AM after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead, while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

Yes. Let us taste "new possibilities and strengths". In illumi9ate, I'm gonna support you in this final part of connecting to your dreams in this material way in order to.. in Lorde's words again, "lay the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before".

We will create a poem towards the end of our work together.. Well you will create this poem and I'll support you in ways to connect to your poetic voice in order to really solidify your imagination and create a personalized poetic map for yourself that's going to inevitably, inevitably, lead to the realization of your dream world.

Okay. I hope that was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions, feel free to reach out, via the comments here. If you don't subscribe to this newsletter already, I highly encourage it so you can get them as soon as I send them in your inbox. Invite a friend. Next up will be, more info on this offer. I'm still doing the back end work. It looks like I'll be opening up in early 2026 for consultation calls and to actually sign folks up for this journey.

If you're interested and want me to include you in the list of emails that I'm gonna send out, inviting people that may be interested, send me a note. Thanks for being here, and take care, bye 🌈

I have been on a bit of a break while I set up my new home. It's been quite a journey, and I've been exhausted.

I am finally settled enough to be able to kind of drop in and do this. I did actually record this episode, two or three days ago, and I found out after forty ish minutes of the recording, that the software that I was trialing out, recording in, even though it looked like it was recording, did not actually pick up on the audio. So that audio went into the ether. Still, I, you know, decided to rerecord. So let's see how this goes. I am way more confident that it is being recorded, though, so that's a bonus. Alright. So, yeah, welcome back.

Awaken into your dream with Human Design (Original audio)

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I am doing a multi part series lead up to my upcoming offer called Illumi9ate, which is an offering, that is going to be in four parts, for light-bearing leaders who are seeking to make some kind of bold move towards being the free architects of your creative life.

Illumi9ate will consist of four sessions where we have intuitive inner leadership dialogues, in order to set up that journey towards your transgressive creative freedom, and it will equip you with tools and practices that are going to really soothe and clarify and enrich your pivot, and the soothing is intended to support that free fall feeling that challenging transitions tend to entail. We'll be investigating and releasing any illusory fears and thought prisons that prevent you from taking that kind of risk towards yourself, whether it is quitting your job or, you know, even considering quitting your job towards entrepreneurship, or if it is in making even more space for your creative life. And we're gonna go through this kind of transformative process.

It's not gonna be a surface level journey. It's this kind of deeper uncovering of whatever keeps you stuck or small so that you can remember and reclaim your dream creative, playful self.

In this ongoing series that I've been doing on this podcast, I've been introducing, who light-bearing leaders are, and what it means to be somebody that is able to bring a light to shine on everybody around you while struggling to shine that light on yourself, and how we're gonna build up this intuitive technology toolkit. The first part was about Astrology. The second was about Tarot. And this week, I'm going to talk about Human Design, and next week, I'll talk about poetry, which will be the four intuitive technologies that we're playing with.

I highly recommend going back and checking out the arc of this journey so far where we went through the limiting beliefs, mental anxieties, and how Astrology and the cosmic view it presents can support us in that aspect. We then move towards how, collectively, we're all navigating this sense of loneliness and separation from our ecosystems and what it means to reconnect with Earth in an ecosystem that your belonging is never a question in, and how the Tarot can support us in that process. This week, we're gonna talk about Human Design and pick up where we left off, where we have a bit more clarity about the limiting beliefs that are holding us back. We have a bit more connection to an ecosystem that we weren't paying attention to, but now we're feeling more connected to, where we experience true belonging. And the underlying dream that was buried starts to resurface in this part of the journey. There then comes this question of, can I actualize this dream? How will I actualize this dream?

And it feels daunting and sometimes impossible. Right? Especially as creatives, there is the sense that if you're an artist or an entrepreneur, that it's not really possible to experience stability or security in this kind of life, and that there's always a need to be employed or have some kind of way to consistently make an income. And those are definitely practical considerations, and sometimes it is not possible to just make a jump without considering those consequences. And there's definitely financial privilege and access to resources and opportunities and systemic considerations, even around, you know, what kind of time you have, what kind of energy you have, how many spoons you have, what your chronic illnesses, your neurodivergences, and disabilities might— what kind of challenges they might create even when they bring you unique talents and gifts.

Here we kind of get into this layer of, like, wow. I have a sense of my path. I can sense of who I belong with. But in terms of just actually doing the thing, it just feels almost impossible. It feels almost impossible to entertain the dream without having a sense of the how. And the how, I found in my own journey to be particularly, a very hard trap. In my early entrepreneurship journey, I kind of constantly dealt with this this "how" question. I had this desire and this kind of wanting around — not wanting to have the nine to five life, not wanting to have to work in a corporation in order to live, wanting to make art and to have access to rest and feel pleasure and take care of my body.

And I wanted this not just for myself, but for the collective too. I wanted it for all artists, especially the people around me that I was seeing who were multiply marginalized due to systemic factors, disability, neurodivergence, all of these things. The more I learned about the processes of what it takes to write grants or any of these things that are needed to kind of prove that our livelihood needs to be fundamentally supported. Whenever there was this kind of project based orientation, for example grants, it really bothered me because it requires you to define the beginning and end of a project and to declare it and to wait for the money before you even, get into it sometimes. And I was like, well, what if we just paid artists, and then they can make work instead of having to declare what it is that they're going to make because that feels very antithetical at least to my process. I just want people's needs to be met, and I want everybody to have access to rest and pleasure. And, I want myself to have that too. I don't wanna have to choose between making art and living a life and sustaining myself, and I don't want anyone else to have to make those choices either, even though, you know, we live we live in this world.

I constantly ended up in incubators or these kinds of programs. Not all of them were like this. I was very grateful to meet people who were doing anti capitalist business like Toi Marie. And yet I hadn't fully understood how to operate in a way that was sustainable for myself. And so the more I was feeling kind of unsuccessful at what I was doing, and I wasn't just immediately able to bridge the gap between what used to be my income and the income I was able to make through doing work with clients one on one or workshops — I just felt like I was missing something. I was missing something that had to do with something outside of me that was about how to run a business effectively, having some kind of system or structure, or maybe having somebody else who's going to collaborate with me and then solve all my problems. None of which really helped. It just left me even more burned out because I was continuing to go down paths that weren't right for me.

This was about the time that I had, you know, maybe at some point in this journey after all the burnouts and kind of pulling back and figuring out what was going on, I had come in contact with the Human Design. I was very skeptical because I got this kind of a sense like, oh, this is a cult. I don't think it is a cult now, but that is how I felt at the beginning. I have been in cults, and I was just very wary, but it didn't stop me from looking at my Human Design chart. And I was like, oh, this is actually quite insightful. And one of the things that was very instrumental in my ability to embrace the how of my practice, was learning something called type in Human Design, and my Type is a Projector.

I don't wanna go too much into the tactics of what is Human Design, how do we get here, all of that. Yet, for those of you who are absolutely new to it and have never heard of it, I will give a short explanation.

So Human Design is a framework that tries to bridge across science and esoteric traditions. And the esoteric traditions that it combines and draws from includes the Chakra system from Southeast Asia and South Asia, and the Tree of life from the Jewish Kabbalah tradition, the I Ching which is a Chinese divinatory system, and Astrology or tropical astrology as inherited from Northern Africa, Egypt, and then Greco Roman traditions and traditions around the world. And then it bridges across these esoteric traditions to scientific models around quantum mechanics and the anatomy of our body itself. And it presents you.. before I say that, so all of this, how to combine these systems and what you present was information that was channeled, or you could say, received through inspiration to this person whose name is Ra Uru Hu. And I believe this all happened in 1987 when he got this information, and started to kind of experiment with it, put it together. And then over the next decade or so, he kind of ends up formalizing the system, and then other people have come in contact with it, worked with him, brought it into books, software. Lots of things exist in this (Human Design) world.

I am not very deep into Human Design, but I have studied it enough to be able to read my own chart and play with reading other people's charts. And my style of reading is very collaborative and co-creative. I am not here to decide your future or declare what that is going to be or any of the choices that you're going to make, but to, you know, translate what I know about these systems and all of the learning and reading and studying that I do to understand them, and translate it towards your own creative freedom and understanding of yourself.

So with that little bit of an intro, basically, what happens is when you look up your Human Design chart, it gives you what is called a Body Graph, and the graph presents these energetic centers and channels. And so it presents your entire body in the shape of an energetic map or a graph.

And you can see— Where do you have consistent energy and sources of energy, that you are bringing? And where are you more open or undefined and susceptible to being influenced and conditioned by your environment or other people's energies? From this information and the overlaying of all of the systems that I mentioned, you get very detailed information about what kind of energetic resources you're working with, what kind of challenges you're dealing with, what happens when you enter into collaboration with other people, what happens when you ignore parts of yourself. And one of the cool things is that they not only look at what is available to you consciously, but also what can be available to you unconsciously, in order to present you with information that maybe you have some sense of, but not very much clarity around because you don't have conscious access to it.

There are these estimations of how many people or what percentage of the population belong in these Types. And 70% of people are supposedly Generators who are people who have this kind of, steady source of Sacral life energy, as long as they are able to utilize this energy in conversation with life itself. And then there are, Manifestors who are able to initiate and bring things into reality. There are Projectors who don't have, actually, only only generators have Sacral defined. Whereas the other three — Manifestors, Reflectors, and Projectors don't have that, but have different kind of abilities. So, like I said, manifestors can initiate, bring things to life, and projectors, which is the type that I am, have the ability to be able to read energetic patterns, and things that are going on for other people. And reflectors are people who are kind of like projectors on steroids. You could say they have the ability to really reflect back somebody else because they aren't bringing, too much of their own definition to the table.

So, I'm talking at a high level, and if this doesn't all make sense, that is totally reasonable. But what I can say is learning I was a Projector and learning that I'm not coming in with, a defined source of my own Sacral energy alone was a big, big game changer for me because I was already navigating it in some ways.. because I already knew that I was Disabled and Neurodivergent, that I was not particularly high in spoons. And one of the biggest challenges for me was to figure out what would even be sustainable for me, and I could never figure that out. It was often dependent on recovering my body or supporting my well-being such that I was doing well enough, to be able to show up to my business consistently.

But looking at it from a Human Design perspective allowed me to see how, one, I was very much pushing myself based on how I saw lots and lots of people around me operate. If 70% of people are Generators and can operate from a place of having a steady source of life energy, people around me are, you know, doing things. They're exercising. Even things like doing a whole nine to five job, which I'm not saying that Generators should do just because they're Generators, but there is a sense of if it is something that you want to do, you have access to energy to do it. For me, that didn't necessarily feel true, and it felt really freeing to be like, oh, okay. Yeah. It's true.

I don't feel like I have a steady source of Sacral life energy the same way that other people seem to do around me. I do have the ability to read what's going on for other people. And when I didn't know that I have the capacity to really quickly read and respond to what's going on for others.. I would sometimes show up in conversations with my friends where I would ask a question, and they would be kind of taken aback, and they might say something like, "are you coaching me?". And I'd be like, no. I'm just curious, but that makes sense. I did study and train to be a coach, so I can understand why it would come across this way. And this happened to me a couple of times, and I was always unsettled because I was like, I'm just being myself, but I need to titrate how I show up.

I was also really struggling to understand why people weren't working with me. You know? I would be just trying to make things happen in my business, and they never worked out. In fact, often the opposite would happen whenever I try to make things happen. People would kind of take two steps back when I would approach them and try to see if they were interested in my work.. The idea that.. for instance, one of the common business advice you get when you are doing one on one work is that, when people come to you for a consult call, then you show them what you can do. And in my case, that wasn't particularly fruitful, often because the readiness for receiving the kind of almost, what do you say, very, like, deep and penetrative kind of awareness that a Projector's Aura can bring to the room felt like too much for situations where there wasn't trust in a container and all this stuff that was built up to hold that level of depth that I can quickly reach with somebody. Often, I felt that I was in coaching conversations where I was wanting to go deep or that's kind of my mode of operation, but they wanted very tactical, practical solutions. And I would agree to, you know, look up information about worksheet or an exercise, but I didn't like doing it. I wanted to be like, no.

I don't know that I can help you select one career out of thousand. What I would like to do is to understand what prevents you from experimenting with your careers in the first place, and then you can choose whichever you want, whichever career you wanna choose. But I wasn't saying that because I wasn't once again, wasn't very aware of my skills. I found it very difficult to even articulate what I brought to the room, and I'm speaking just of this one aspect so far.

From Type, (we derive) something called a Strategy. So depending on your type, you might, like, how you make decisions can be different and how you show up to make change in the world or create things or respond to your life will be different. And for Projectors, the Strategy, in Human Design is "Wait for the Invitation". Wait for the invitation was a real game changer for me. It really showed me how I was causing people to step back by doing the Projector thing of being able to get really insightful and deep about somebody else's situation, without consent. And it's not that I meant to, you know, non-consensually coach my friends, but that's that's the thing. I just didn't know that whether or not I was coming from a place of just curiosity, the way that my energy shows up involves this kind of depth. So I have to be really even more explicit.

And often, I can be quiet and let people, come to me with specific questions, and then even then, I can ask them. Okay. So, yeah, would you like my advice, or would you like me to ask you a question based on what I just heard? Can I ask you a coaching question? Can I, you know, tell you what is coming up for me? And, you know, you can stop me.

Waiting for the invitation and also confirming and checking for what's actually going on at a high level, it shifted how I thought about my business overall. I stopped feeling like I have to go out there and get people to sign up for my work. Instead, I was like, no. What I need to do, is to follow my desire and be myself and put myself out there. And then people who resonate with my work and how I show up to it and are willing to traverse the depth, which not everybody want to do wants to do, will be able to come and work with me. Part of this involved a process of grieving and recognizing the ways that I had been pushing myself against the grain, feeling constantly like I'm falling short of my responsibilities because I wasn't willing to just, take up a nine to five job because that would solve some of the monetary stress that I was experiencing.

And I was like, the truth was actually really clear to me all along. It's not that I need Human Design to tell me this necessarily, but it provided me with a framework to think about it in a very simple, direct way and translate it into the day to day how of my my business.

There have been many more aspects of learning this particular technology that have been continuing to refine for me how I operate and how I can operate from learning about my needs — to withdraw and hermit, and my inherent capacity to be able to network and build connections without consciously acting towards it. My innate strengths in learning in ways that are pre-synthesized without knowing all the details. I always knew that I was a global learner, and Human Design just kind of confirmed that for me, in terms of just how easy it is for me to you know, for instance, I'm talking to you about Human Design right now. And even though I've studied Human Design through a course from Kelsey Rose Tort, whose work is amazing, I haven't, read like, I don't know what every single detail of every single thing in Human Design means. Not that anybody does except maybe the people who founded it, but, there's a lot to learn. And the more details there are, it's often really hard for me, but that doesn't stop me from knowing that I know. And I can see why that's the case through understanding my design.

It taught me where my strengths are and where my challenges are, where I'm so susceptible to other people's energies and fields and capacities in a way that takes away from myself, and where I can protect myself energetically in order to continue to sustain my practice. It's shifted me towards operating from this place where I show up from a place of my desire. I say the things I wanna say. I do it on my own time because working on anyone else's time isn't isn't true to me or or my design. And, yeah, to really flow with emotionality and vulnerability, and be open to my own sensitivity to the nature around me, to my environment.

Now that can be a strength if I am aware of what is actually going on. There's this notion in Human Design that it's not a fixed system of guidance that you need to just accept without questioning, and that when you learn about your chart--- you're kind of beginning an experiment, to see what works for you and what doesn't. Just being in this experiment kicks off a process of de-conditioning that enables us to see where we're conditioned by the forces around us, so that we can free ourselves. And to me, this feels very much in line with decolonization and liberation because our conditioning fields include colonial capitalism, and it is, of course, a major conditioning field that we're all subjected to. And you knew this before I talked about Human Design.

Right? Like, we already know the ways in which.. for instance, we're conditioned to believe that there is one time. That there are twenty four hours for everybody, and that is it. And yet colonial clock-based time as we know it was invented not that long ago. For me personally, learning about some of the aspects of my design and about how I can't keep my keep routines and structures in a very easy way, and yet, I kind of operate on my own sense of time and urgency, my own sense of how long it takes me to process emotions and come to clarity, and that can't really operate in the same cycles of time. It was pretty freeing.

I was like, yeah. It's true. It's true. I kinda already knew that, but thank you for confirming it. And each of these choices that I can make to run my business and run my practice in ways that are completely unique to me and don't necessarily fit the bill of a business incubator that I'm learning from or what I see around me or, you know, somebody on Instagram who's really successful at business on day one versus me who was taking, like, I don't even know how long to come to this place where I even feel open to, inviting people back into my practice after a long break.

I might have lost my thread there., What has been super fruitful for me in this process of de-conditioning and opening up to my uniqueness has been the sense of being able to have conversations with people just really frankly about my levels of energy. You know, there's a sense with the Projector of being kind of in a, we could look at it as a leech-like relationship or a symbiotic relationship with others. And because I'm not coming with my own, life energy, I'm often, you know, needing help from others, needing structures, things like that.

I've learned that because I'm aware of that, the ways that I can get that can be honest and transparent. The ways that I can meet that are in being in reciprocal relationship with the land around me, with the trees around me, that I can ask for the help I need while also claiming my own private space, claiming my own sense of timing and flow, and really being able to open up to the abundance that lives in my own fingertips. And live and move with this sense of inner knowing and confidence, from being one with what's living and growing around me and being in contact with who I am. I think that understanding your creative practice through this lens can be a game-changer for how you show up to your practice, and even little bits of information can blow your mind and take a long time to practice and integrate. I love that Human Design can bring what we learned from the high level cosmic view of astrology and bring it down to the level of the body and our day to day practices. It really flows really well with with time, or decolonial time and flow models. I had a reading with this practitioner who also does decolonial time work, whose name is Ixchel Lunar, and it was really affirming to talk with them too about this notion of how these systems work with each other.

Personally, I love how these three talk to each other, Astrology, Tarot, and Human Design. And in being somebody that speaks multiple languages, esoteric languages, and connects the dots between them, I'm very excited to see where our our collaborative journey with Illumi9ate will take us and what we will learn from your design and how we come together in it.

Okay. I think that is where I'm gonna leave it for this episode, and I will see you soon, talk to you soon. And the next part will be about Poetry. Meanwhile, if you have questions about Human Design or any of the things I've talked about, I welcome your comments or send me an email. Yeah. I hope you're good.

Mercury retrograde is almost wrap wrapped up. So by now, hopefully, next week, we'll be moving forward, and I am grateful for this period of withdrawal and rest and reflection in Scorpio season and to come back into creative flow Sag season. Alright, friends. Take care, and I'll see you soon. Bye 🌈

Tarot receives the lonely creative --- original audio

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So I decided to do it again, but it has taken me over a week to come back to it. It's been a time of being really experiencing flares in my body and fatigue, and I've had a relatively good baseline the past few weeks, months, and so it just kinda felt like a dip in my energy --- healing is cyclical, so it happens. And, yeah, I'm in the process of releasing, my upcoming offer. It's called Illumi9ate. I am so excited to be coming closer to the launch.

Illumi9ate is a creative offering, where we are going to dialogue and explore these intuitive technologies of astrology, Tarot, human design, and poetry, and it's for people who are light bearing leaders who are making a big leap towards being the free architects of your own creative life. You're likely doing this because you are in the process of letting go of the oppressive boxes that demand that you dim your light. And in this four part transformative journey, you'll be invited to inquire and release illusory fears and thought prisons that try to keep you stuck or small so you can remember and to reclaim your dream, playful, creative self. It will be coming in a couple weeks!

This is the third part in a, I thought it was gonna be four parts, but now I'm realizing it may be more like five part lead up to the launch of this program. So last week, I talked about astrology. And before that, I talked about who light-bearing leaders are, and I highly recommend checking out the past two episodes if you haven't been keeping up with them so far, especially if you're interested in working with me in this container.

So this week, we're talking about Tarot. If you are completely unfamiliar with the Tarot, it is a card deck that has a very similar approach to cards as the 56 cards of the playing cards, except it has a slight difference in the, Jack, King, Queen component. In Tarot, unlike the playing cards which have those three, there are Pages, Knights, Queens and Kings, and then there's the four suits, which are referred to in the Tarot as Swords, Cups, Pentacles and Wands. They also have elemental associations. And on top of these cards, the Tarot also has 22 Major arcana cards, and they represent archetypes, like, the emperor and The Empress and the wheel of fortune.

These are major archetypes that we navigate, whether it is, people archetypes or situational archetypes. And together, the major arcana is 22 cards and the minor arcana is 56 cards, combined to become a 78 card deck. The particular Tarot lineage that I'm most familiar with comes from this deck, called the Rider Waite Smith deck or the Smith Waite deck in order to put, Pamela Coleman Smith, who is the, designer and artist of this deck, in the first place since in the last, I wanna say ten years or so, there has been a revival of understanding the contribution that Pamela Coleman Smith made to the deck and how it was not recognized nor was she paid very much for it in the time that she was alive.

So, yeah, I wanted to say too that this program, Illumi9ate, was actually inspired by the Nines of the Tarot, and, I'm counting from the major arcana, the nine card, which is The Hermit, the 19 card, which is The Sun. There's also the four nines of the suites. So Nine of Swords, Nine of Wands, Nine of Cups, and Nine of Pentacles. They can also be, described through elemental associations. So, Swords would be air. Wands would be fire, Cups would be water, and Pentacles is earth. And these associations aren't always the same depending on the deck you have or use or are interested in or look up on the Internet — the associations may change. There are so many decks out there right now, that comprise a wide variety of artistic styles, focus areas, themes.

When I started to learn Tarot, I felt like I needed to start with the Smith-Waite deck in order to know what everything else is derived from. And it's not the only deck that things are derived from. There's a a couple other decks that are considered closer to source decks that then there is a tradition around, but this is the one that I have learned, and and I'm most familiar with at this moment.

While I did feel like I needed to start with the Smith-Waite deck, and I it also provided, a lot of hesitation for me because it felt very white European, and I was hesitant to learn the Tarot itself because it just felt like this practice that came from eighteenth and nineteenth century European occultists, which is true. The deck that we use and the derivatives of that deck do hearken back to that to that lineage. However, with the help of learning from liberatory, Tarot readers — for instance, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson taught a workshop on spiritual sovereignty where they went into how these archetypes, even if we don't queer them or change them, provide us a way to think about what is actually going on in the systems of the world, who is it trying to describe. If we take those meanings into consideration, then we get something that helps us describe the systemic influences and the archetypes that exist in order to keep the systems of colonial capitalism going. And these archetypes are not just present in the outside worlds, but they are also inside us.

So the emperor or The Empress, when it shows up, even if it is the Smith-Waite deck and you are looking at this very, colonial power showing up on the deck, it, helps us connect to these archetypes as what kind of internalized colonialism could exist within us that can be reflected through them. And/or you can also buy and use decks that are actually really diverse and queer, and there are lots of entry points. But I do think it's helpful to trace the sources a little bit. So being that this is not a podcast about the history of the Tarot, I will talk a little bit more about how I have connected the nines of the Tarot to this program, just briefly, and then I will tell you a little bit of a story about why and how I got into the Tarot and the gifts that it has brought me in my creative practice and working towards my creative freedom, especially in the realms of feeling a sense of belonging and collaboration in my work. So as I was saying, this program, like, the four weeks of the program are tethered to the nines of the Tarot.

And the first week, we will work with the Nine of Air or Swords realm, which depicts the thought prisons that kind of keep us hostage and don't let us go to sleep — the limiting beliefs, mental anxieties and repetitive loops that keep running in our head —that prevent us from even believing that we can take big risks and go towards our own sovereign creative freedom. And this is where I find astrology to be super helpful, and this is what I talked about in the last episode. And even though I didn't mention the Nine of air or Swords, that's the underlying anchor for that week. And then we get into this week, of the Tarot, the second week, which is about, the Nine of fire or Wands where you get this kind of picture of loneliness and grief and separation from a sense of community because of having to make certain choices that set you apart from the group and then kind of feeling alone from that, feeling a sense of loss from that, and how the Tarot has supported me, in that journey is kind of what we're gonna talk about today.

This will lead us into the third week of human design where we're gonna anchor to the Nine of Cups of water, and this will be a way to, feel into what is the dream and where are we feeling this sense of scarcity that we can't even begin to connect to our dream because it feels like it will never be realized even if we take those steps. And how can we work with, this practice of human design where we get to understand who we are and how we operate on such a practical level that it allows us to see how those dreams can be brought into reality by working with ourselves and releasing this illusion of scarcity and believing in the possibility that the world could be well and the world is being remade anew as you, dreamer, light bearer, take these steps towards your dreams.

Then we flow into week four for poetry where we're working with the Nine of earth or Pentacles that is this beautiful lush card where you can see the fertility and the beauty and the sense of rewards and success that comes with working in a reciprocal, relationship with your own desire and with your ecosystems. And to release this kind of self and systemic censure against choosing pleasure so that we can begin to reveal, like The Sun card, which is what we're going towards, the 19, to revel in our shining beauty with our hands outstretched. I think poetry provides a beautiful path for this and connects us to the sensorial realm of pleasure and reclaiming what is hidden due to shame and letting that be free.

So that's kind of the the arc of the program. The nine major arcana card or The Hermit who in the Smith-Waite deck is kind of this wise old person who is, holding up a lantern. It looks like they are on top of clouds and they're looking down, and this is the work that we're doing. We're gonna be holding up this, like, gentle light, like a candle, solar lantern, an oil lamp, and looking into the shadowy realms, and coming back out so that we can, with the information that we have, with the new perspective that we have gained, it allows us to see things differently. And when we can see things differently, then a new reality can exist because our perception informs our realities.

That's the overview and how the Tarot, connects with this program. And that said, I wanna tell you the story of how Tarot received me at a time of grief and loss of friendships and why I chose to weave the Tarot into my offering in the first place.So I asked the Tarot to help me read this story for you using this beautiful deck that I love. It's called Gentle Tarot, by Mari in the Sky.

And this is what they presented. I'll have the image up on the post so you can see it. So there was a card that I had pulled for myself that day, and it was, in this deck, the Harvest of Thunder, which is the king of Swords. So, like I said, different decks map these things differently in order to have a diversity of ways that we can engage with these cards, because not everybody resonates with kings and queens and Swords and Pentacles. So Harvest of Thunder was the card that I pulled for myself, and it was a confirmation for me that I can speak into this clear narrative on the power of the Tarot, to connect us with an ecosystem that we already belong to and to heal from grief, and I do that by trusting in my power to communicate in queer and radical and healing ways.

I also put down the Nine of Wands as the query, the card that we're working with this week. As I was talking about, the Nine of Wands for me, suggests this experience of dis-belonging in community after making choices that alienate you or pull you into the shadows. It presents the sense of needing people, but not wanting to get hurt from being with people. Where the Nine of Wands presents a sense of loneliness, it also suggests the sense of taking action and the Wands, being this element of fire definitely suggests the sense of taking steps, taking action, moving forward, and doing that from this place of self agency. My Nine of Wands moments have happened over the years when, and specifically, I had this experience, I wanna say, a year and a half ago, where I had been in the process of creating and supporting these creative projects and artistic collaborations that I had put a lot of work into and time into.

Ultimately, I ended up losing, those friendships and collaborations and the projects, from eventually getting a sense that I couldn't actually get any of my needs met, or my vision couldn't actually be represented in those projects because because I wasn't being seen as a collaborator, but as somebody that was going to be following orders. And I think that if I had been more connected to my needs and hadn't been as focused on making sure that I have collaborators because I had been feeling so lonely in being a solo entrepreneur, that I would be willing to shift and massage my goals and interests into whatever was needed to help the group move forward... And once I clued into the fact that, oh, I'm also an artist in this collaboration, and my artistic needs also need to be represented here, and I can't just assume that they are going to be. And the moment that I insisted or even just tried to insist on what I needed, then I learned that that wasn't actually true. So, yeah, anyway, these relationships ended.

And I also had top surgery at this time, and so I was just kind of feeling this massive sense of severance and grief and loneliness. And I went from having somebody to talk to about what was going on for me in a regular basis to not having that at all. And even if in retrospect, it wasn't a friendship that I wanted to continue, it was still really hard at the time. I think too, collectively, since the pandemic especially, and with the amount of polarization that we're experiencing in these fascist times, it's been hard for, many of my friends and many people around me to find a sense of belonging in community and are often dealing with interpersonal rejection, loss and separation from close friendships due to ideological differences, and that has definitely been a theme of our time, whether it is like, coming out as queer and trans and losing your family, taking some kind of step because you are pro Palestinian and you told, somebody in your job something about that, and then that results in material impacts, including the loss of livelihood or stability.

All of these ways, that we stand up for our values and we act in support of our values and learn that we can't also keep our really a sense of belonging when we do that --- that, to me, is is the place of the Nine of Wands. So the three cards I drew, to narrate what happens in response to this Nine of Wands where, 13 Death, 3 Empress, the Five of Stones or Pentacles.

I'm looking at this Death card I think about, there's this hermit crab here. It's like there's a shell on top, and then they're kind of, entering this new cocoon. So the sense of, shedding a shell in order to enter a new possibility. And Death isn't about literal death all the time, but there is some kind of dying that's happening. And the dying and the process of grieving often leads way to entering a new shape. And even though there might be a period of, darkness that's associated with that, it also provides us a path to choose to be alone in order to get perspective, and that is what I did. I felt at the end of these relationships that I needed to reclaim my agency, to focus on my own artistic practice and what I wanted, and to stop ceding them to this illusion of having this one big happy family of collaborators and artists who just get each other and aren't going to hurt each other. This kind of all utopian vision that was being presented to me at this time, that I don't think I resonated with. Because inside, I was like, well, all of these collaborations will lead to conflict, and when it leads to conflict, and we will work through them. And then on the other side, we will be stronger.

And I think that I was a bit too theoretical in that time. And even though we had gone through some conflict, it had mostly about me taking accountability and apologizing versus me asking them for something and, saying what I was having a problem with. I think I wasn't even fully aware of what I was having a problem with yet, at least. So, yeah, I went through this period of death, and I was like, I'm gonna focus on myself. I'm gonna try all these things.

I'm gonna experiment. And there were some downsides to this — becoming almost too hardened in this new cocoon and feeling like I couldn't actually show up to working with people just yet because I was feeling so burned at the time. But taking space and releasing my old shape allowed me to experience new things. So, yeah, I had taken a poetry class at the time. I was studying some psychology. I tried lots of different things, and I found Seeda School and Ariana Felix's work at the time, and then I started to work with them in remote classes or group containers and then one on one containers. And it started to create so much more, of the the transformative or transformation aspects of this Death step started to come to light.

So then from there, we go into the second card, The Empress, and here we see, this Caribou, with majestic antlers standing on this, grassy green land with the mountains in the backdrop. There's some pines towering over them. They seem to be wearing the sun as a halo. And there's just all these beautiful pink and white flowers that are surrounding them. It's just very green and lush. I think about The Empress as a card of Venus, which is a common association. There's a sense of attraction and connection with nature and especially in this card, with nonhuman kin. There's a sense of being present to your sensorium, to slowing down, to see where you are already calm, where you always belong no matter what, and how this lush, nourishing, creative life energy runs through you, an Earth being. No matter what community you are in or who your friends are in this moment, you already belong to an ecosystem. And that is at the root of your creative power, and that's what The Empress tells me.

And I do resonate with this. This next part in my story of really taking the space to --- when I didn't when I didn't have strong friendships to converse with on a day to day basis, and then I felt like I didn't have any collaborators on my projects --- turn to the tree outside my home, the plants on my table, the jars of moss that I made into little moss mossariums, that I had gathered from torn pieces of moss on an island, in a retreat that was once again an example an an example of community spaces where belonging is really fraught. And, yeah, the moss came with me, and the moss jars are on my table connecting with me.

I started to watch birds. I started to take photographs and really allow my creativity to open up and started to see how the people that I had found --- as I was talking about with Seeda school, and all the community spaces that I was engaging in from this place of feeling rooted and connected to, Earth itself and the Land mother, the Moon grandmother, and the planets, the stars, Astrology, and Tarot. They just started to provide for me this sense of being so grounded and rooted in myself that then I could show up to these community spaces that I was now part of --- that did have a very different vibe from the community space I was used to because it was so much more discerning now --- And also, to come in with very different expectations, very different boundaries, and really own my creative intelligence.

And then we have the third card, the Five of Stones. Looking at this card, we see this turtle. They look a little concerned, and there's five stones at the bottom of the floor. There's light streaming through. We see a person who is dipping their head into the water and looking down at the turtle. And the guidebook of this deck talks about how turtles are prone to being impacted by the amount of plastic that's in our waters and how there's this need for, recognizing that what goes around comes around into the relationship with earth, Pentacles, Stones.

When I think about the larger arc of the program that I'm building, it feels to me like from the realm of air where we're talking about astrology and limiting beliefs and thought prison, to then get into the fire element where with the Nine of fire where we talk about Tarot and the ecosystems that we belong in, we get pointed towards Water and Earth in this card, from the anxious Nine of Air to the lonely Nine of Fire, we have overcome. We maybe are sleeping better, and we're looking around us, and we're starting to feel connected to life. And from here, the dream world calls, and the dream world is where we're gonna get into with the Nine of Cups. There's an ancient call to being in reciprocal relationship with your body and the lands and waters of the earth, tugging at you. And cautiously, you're approaching the watery realms of the dream world knowing that you are a spark of creation itself. To remember who you are and your role as a light-bearing leader.

I wanna reflect that the Tarot in this way has created for me, this connection to the rich cast of characters, archetypes, and images that speak to me and connect to my intuition and mirror to me what's going on, show me the things that I don't tend to see on my own because we aren't very good observers of ourselves when we are inside ourselves. And through this process, it's made me feel so much more connected to getting advice from my own intuition through reading cards or through literally going out into the world and touching trees and touching grass, that I already belong.

Tarot has provided me ways to make decisions for my business. It's provided me ways to play with randomness and chaos so that I can come into like, this very podcast where I can draw some cards and I can talk you through the story rather than feeling really frozen about what is it that I'm even going to say or write. It's cleared the sense of writer's block or artist block or entrepreneur block — I don't know if that's a thing, let's make it up. And showing me that I don't need other people to validate what I'm doing when I can trust my own intuition, and I can have a conversation with my own spirit and guides by drawing cards and reading them. It puts that kind of power back in your hands, and it does it by using this very visual, very practical, very easy to access system that also provides you like, gathered context from all of the ways that that particular card has, resonated for other people. Cyrée Jarelle Johnson talks about the notion of using the cards as ancestral citation, and I really like that. Because when I was doing, coaching outside the context of integrating astrology or Tarot, I did find that I could get I found that I couldn't validate what I was saying necessarily because I was trying to speak from, what was coming up for me, but I am a human who has emotions and what not. And how much ever, I could be careful about not letting those show up in this space, I do think that it's wonderful to be able to read Tarot cards or Astrology charts, and there is a reference. There is someone else, something else that is also speaking with us, and that's our own intuition, the field between us, other beings potentially talking to us, through us, depending on your own belief systems. And the very cards, like, the deer, the turtle, the hermit crabs, the Caribou on the cards are also speaking with us.

My invitation to you, lonely creative, if this resonates with you is, Who is already in conversation with you, when you slow down to listen? That I believe is the medicine that the Nine of fire or Wands is offering to us.

I just completed a an eleven week program with Christopher Marmolejo who wrote this book called Red Tarot, a Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy. It was such a beautiful cohort and interactive dialogical program where we went into reads of the cards that were visual, intuitive, socially attuned to understanding what is the shadow, what is it that we inherited in this system that was, created through a a variety of occult systems weaved together by a European occult group and really breaking that down so that every read of every card can be infused with this kind of 360 view. It's been such a joyful journey for me. And through this process, the Tarot has become so much more alive in my day to day life.

I'm very excited to bring the Tarot into illuminate as the second week, and I hope you will continue to tune in to the next couple of episodes about Human Design and poetry. Send me a note if you feel like it. Thank you for being here, and take care friends! 🌈

Links from this episode:

• Cyrée Jarelle Johnson: https://cyreejarellejohnson.com/
• Seeda School: https://seedaschool.com/
• Ariana Felix: https://arianafelix.substack.com/
• Christopher Marmolejo: https://www.theredread.com/

I am here today to talk about how the practice of creative astrology has allowed me to stop holding on so tight in my business and my creative practices, and go towards being led by desire and allowing myself to be open to receiving. This episode is part of a four part, lead up to the launch of my upcoming offer called Illumi9ate. Illumi9ate is a four week one on one offering for lightbearing leaders who are leaping towards transgressive creative freedom.

In this transformative four part journey, you are invited to inquire and release the illusory fears and thought presence that try to keep you stuck or small — so you can remember and reclaim your dream, playful, creative self. This offering brings together astrology, tarot, human design, and poetry.

I recorded this as an audio episode, transcribed here.

Astrology as a salve for creative anxiety

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Last week, I introduced the notion of who lightbearing leaders are, and you are welcome to go back and revisit this newsletter. I say in this last episode that, light-bearing leaders have a deep sense of sense of responsibility and duty towards nourishing the collective and taking action that supports others. I also go on to talk about some of the challenges that come with that. To summarize, a lot of that has to do with being able to, shine a light on other people while not being able to shine a light on yourself or struggling to shine a light on yourself, struggling to take up space, knowing always that you can show up for others, but being unsure if you are even open to others showing up for you. Sometimes it feels like if you don't show up for yourself, nobody will show up for you, and that is, a way this can manifest.

And my work and my upcoming offer is geared towards these light bearing leaders, who are making a pivot or transition towards becoming the leaders of your own creative practices. Perhaps you are wanting to start a business. Perhaps you're already an entrepreneur, and you want to deepen into being really free and open and bring all the weird skills or what you think are weird skills that you hide from your people because you think that it doesn't fit with everything else or fits with the persona that you've created. And that can be true if you're switching from, like I did, from a, leadership role in the tech world working as a software engineer and then an engineering manager, and leaving to be a coach and then, you know, continuing to really not find my footing in that world, to embracing interdisciplinary freedom.

At first I was trying to study astrology and tarot and human design kind of, you know, on the side. I was like, I'm gonna, be a writer and a poet and these things that I dreamed of my whole life, but, I couldn't think that they would be anything more than hobbies. And even if I thought that I could get published or I could publish myself, I didn't think that I could sustain myself from it. And that's gonna root us into this episode too.

Like, this notion of can we sustain ourselves, with our creativity, with all these things that are supposedly weird, with these things that feel out of place in the audiences or people or teams or communities that we are already in, and so we might be hiding or masking thoughts of ourselves.

So our story starts with me a few years ago, about four years ago when I started my business. And I had a sense that, you know, I was skilled at working with people, at building relationships that especially, like, working in tech, I had perhaps a bloated sense of ego around the skills that I had. And I was like, oh, well, I have done a pretty good job of showing up as a leader in this context and supporting my people. My people seem to agree. They are often telling me that I am either the or one of the best managers that they've ever had. And I know that the bar in tech is very low because I've not, met a lot of managers who do this in tech, but there are also lots of people that I have met who are really, you know, invested in the growth of your people and not so much in, empire building and power grabbing, and even just kind of ignoring the interest of your people because because you're too caught up in the technical details. And while it was gratifying to receive this kind of praise and appreciation, I felt that when I started my business, I would just kind of immediately succeed, right? I was like, oh, well, I've done lots of things for lots of people. So now lots of people will do lots of things for me.

I'm not planning on asking them what they're going to do, but I will, you know, just just hope for the best, and things will pan out because I am skilled and talented, and I have a lot to offer. And guess what? That worked for a little bit, and it worked mostly because my first clients were people who were, my teammates or people who, at the time, were my reports. And I had initially planned to continue to support them in a different role, or at least the company I was working at was meant to create a role that would allow me to show up as a coach, but that didn't actually materialize.

So I decided to leave, because I was really frustrated that I wasn't doing the work that I cared about and I wanted to be doing less tech things and more of a growth, development and people oriented, teaching oriented, coaching oriented role. So when that didn't materialize, I had created this program that was, you know, inviting people into a, twelve week software engineering leadership skills oriented group coaching container with me, and I worked with around five people. It was so beautiful, so rewarding. And after that, I slowly realized, okay, I enjoy doing this.

But then when I try to kind of launch this offer out into the world, nobody signed up. And I was like, why didn't anyone sign up? And to be clear, I posted about this exactly, like, once or twice on LinkedIn. I sent one email to my newsletter, and I reached out to a few people, and that was it. And I thought, "why didn't it pay off? I had a job where lots of people thought I did really good work, and I left that job. I made some posts on the Internet, and people should have lined up."

They didn't. And when I say it like this in in retrospect, it sounds kind of naive, but I'm saying it because I think that lightbearing leaders maybe feel this way in different ways in relation to your own experiences because, like I said, like, we're so used to showing up for other people, and it's very hard to ask for ourselves. Even making two LinkedIn posts about this felt so daunting for me.

I was like, this is so visible. I'm putting my whole heart out there. My entire self-belief is on the line. And, of course, that kind of shot right back at me, and my self-belief tanked because I didn't get what I thought I wanted. And even though I continued to do coaching work, I kept feeling like there was something that was missing for me about the act of making money from business that I hadn't figured out. And if I found the right people, I would be able to figure it out. I just needed to learn something. I needed to learn some information that's held behind lock and key, of some marketing teacher or a business incubator or something like that that would give me the wisdom that will allow me to know what it is that I'm missing in order to make money. And when I had talked to one of my mentors who is a coach that I respect so much, they had told me, hey, I've heard that you people have to see something at least seven times before they take notice of what you're doing.

I was like, what? Let's assume that I'd make a post seven times, then the chances that you see it is probably lower than that. So I was like, okay. So it sounds like I need to post something at least, like, I don't know, 30 plus times, 35 times, let's say, in order for somebody to notice it seven times in order to for it to register once for them. And it was so daunting. Making that many requests of people was so daunting. It just felt like every time I'm making a post, a newsletter, a LinkedIn post, whatever that is, that I was kind of, yeah, ripping my heart out and putting it on the table. And when people didn't respond immediately, or reach out to work with me, it was so personal. It landed so personal for me, not even their actions, but their inaction. How can people that I don't even know take responsibility for what's going on in my business?

Once again, in retrospect, it seems really silly, but in that time, it did feel so heavy. I think that a lot of that heaviness really comes from this kind of, like, one-sided dynamic of believing that it's okay to continue to show up for others and subvert my needs. And to be clear, I didn't even know entirely what my needs were at the time or that I was subverting them. But I was just like, this is unfair. It should be more fair. Not only was it unfair that I didn't get the job that I originally wanted, that I thought I was gonna get, but it's unfair that I did all this for all these people, and that isn't paying off right now.

The people who told me, oh my god, like, you do such great work. And to be clear, I'm not talking about the people who I ended up working with or really, like, anybody, but specifically, like, the kinds of people who really only say something to me about how good my work is. But when I have reached out to them for actual support, whether it was in the job or outside the job, it's really not panning out. Once again, no one else is responsible, and things work out for lots of reasons in some relationships versus other relationships. So be it. But it was all landing too close to heart for me.

From this place, some of the conclusions that I was drawing about what it means to be a business owner, was that it was hard to make money in business, that it takes a lot of time, that it's not really easy. It's only possible to make plenty of money if I say had a corporate contract. In order to have corporate contracts, I need to have some kind of credential and an accreditation. So I should work on those things. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna go try to learn some stuff about marketing that I don't know. It's gonna be the thing that I need to know in order to unlock whatever this is because just asking people over and over again is not what I want to do to even though that's exactly what marketing is.

I was really trying to get some kind of institutional guarantee that I will continue to get paid like I was getting paid in tech. And tech pays a lot of money. And these days when I talk to my friends, I share my salaries in tech. And often, it's met with surprise because, living in Toronto/Tkoronto, people don't get paid this much, you know, as unless they work in tech. And even if they work in tech, companies that are are outside of Canada tend to pay more, even though their their Canadian bands might be lower. When I was trying to formulate a plan for switching into not working full time, I kept trying to figure out how will I make the salary that I was making in tech. Right? And, I will do some paper napkin math and be like, hey. I wanna charge my clients, like, this much for a coaching session, and I would do all this math and be like, okay, so the only way I can, make the amount of money that I was making in tech is if I have a ridiculous number of clients that I am seeing constantly. And I'll be like, oh, I don't think I can do that. So there must be some other trickery. So just kept, like, looking for trickery, and, trickery showed up. You know?

I met and tried to learn from teachers who, even though I had some doubts about their offerings or framing or how they were showing up, I still thought, oh, well, this is just a step. This person seems better than the, person who, you know, like Tony Robbins or something like that who I mean, I read a lot of Tony Robbins as a kid. I don't know why, but here we are. I guess I know why. Because his books wwee in my home, and I read a lot of things. And it's always this kind of bootstrap mentality that is part of what fuels American capitalism. You know, you can do it, If you believe it, you can pull yourself up by by the bootstraps.

I thought, I'm not succeeding because the system doesn't want me to succeed. And maybe that's true to some extent, and I'm sure many of you can relate to that. And yet I didn't see at that time how I was sabotaging myself. Because in all of this so far, whether it is how I feel about marketing or how I feel about my income, I was still r avoiding what is it that would be so filled with passion and desire for me that I would want to do it over and over again, that I would wanna come back to it over and over again irrespective of what's going to be the outcome, irrespective of it being for anybody else, irrespective of it being the thing that immediately matched with my old salary. I was coming from a place of what can I do that will allow me to make enough money so that I can pursue things that are within my Zone of Desire, as Ayana Zaire Cotton would put it.

And that, my friends, was doomed to fail, for me. At some point, this all was present for me, you know, underneath. So I think a couple years ago, I had sent an email saying and that's when I changed the name of my business from Kolam Coaching to Kolam Creative Collective, that it was gonna be oriented towards supporting creative people across lines of, disability and neurodivergence and people who specifically come into the business path or the artistic path from not really fitting into mainstream definitions of these things. And I did say in that that I don't know how this is all going to pan out, but I still felt a lot of urgency. I felt a lot of urgency, and I just felt like, I was just holding tight holding tight and being like, I need to get to the end. I already have the skills. I should be able to do it, and yet I'm not able to do it. I would keep spinning through cycles.

Astrology kind of came into my life, not because I thought I was gonna become an astrologer, but because I just kind of felt this draw towards it. I was raised in a dominant caste, South Indian home where reading horoscopes and electing specific times for specific activities was such a day to day occurrence that it was so normalized in my upbringing. But it was also really challenging for me to even accept my curiosity of astrology because of how I felt towards this kind of, oppressive use of this amazing, cosmic technology. And some of the ways I think that shows up are, one, like, growing up, you know, when someone wants to get married, you would consult an astrologer. And if they don't agree that your horoscopes are a match, then your parents might not agree or it might just not pan out and can often be a way to say yes or no to things.

It can be a way to kind of take away agency from people making their own decisions because an astrologer says so. And that, it's just kind of, all or nothing. And this all or nothing way of looking at astrology is not just within, in those contexts, but coming into the West in queer communities, astrology is so commonly, talked about, and often we exchange, what's your sun sign or your sun, moon, and rising sign. And in some conversations that I have been in, people would either share experiences of or directly to me share some kind of, like, one line summary of what that sign could be. And it often felt pretty reductive.

I was like, I don't even know what they're talking about because at least I knew some of the astrological terminology in the context of, Jyotish Indian astrological traditions, but I didn't entirely know beyond the names of the zodiac signs what anything meant. I was just like, why is what they're saying not resonating? And it, in fact, made me not like astrology. It made me avoid it. I was like, I don't like things that are reducing entire people to these kinds of binary statements and how can that be true. But also, I was like, okay. Everybody around me is speaking this language. I need to understand what this language means. So I started to get into it.

Then I ended up coming across astrologers like Renee Sills and Chani Nicholas who put out liberatory, embodied ways of connecting to astrology that I was like, there is something here. There's something here, and I wanna know more. So I just kinda kept listening to, weekly or monthly readings for some signs, and I would listen to signs that are not mine. I'm just kind of playing around with it, and, it was just kind of a side thing. Meanwhile, I was still doing the the panicking in my business, but on the side, I was just kind of absorbing this.

And the more I absorbed, the more I absorb, I find this sense of, connection with what's going on in the larger collective. In astrology, for instance, the outer planets take long times to transition between signs. So Pluto can take, you know, roughly twenty years to transit through one sign. Neptune takes 14. Uranus takes seven. In these big time spans, generational changes happen. And even learning which generation of any of these planets you're part of then started to make sense to me --- Oh, interesting, we are in this pattern, and this is a way that I can understand how, you know, people who are in my same age group show up to, collective issues and to understand, oh, yeah. These are the challenges that our collective is facing.

It made me feel less alone in the large scale struggles that we all face and that we are witness to in this colonial hellscape that we are often, plunged into. Beyond that, learning about the specifics of my own chart and getting really deep with it --- it's one thing to know your sun sign and have some information about the quality of your energy --- but when I started to see my whole chart, then it just started to come alive for me in my life. All of the symbols and the archetypes started to interplay and interlace with how I connect with other people.

I felt so much freer in terms of how I showed up in my relationships with these expectations, like I was talking about, as to how people would show up to my business or any of these things. And I felt a lot more empathetic and understanding of how we can be so different, how we can respond to situations so differently. And astrology provided for me one way to really visualize and picture that. Instead of feeling like I could reduce a person into a one line description of one sign, I felt that astrology made people endlessly complex, and not only does it connect us to our own path, our own gifts and our own challenges, it also opens us up to understanding what's happening in the collective. It allows this kind of sense, I feel, of zooming out really and looking into what's happening, what's unfolding, and what's been unfolding in, your life and your creativity, your relationships, your friendships from up above, and things feel --- even if you learn about the challenging parts of your life in this way, It feels so validating. It feels so like you're being seen by the cosmos in your unique pathway in this life.

That was so attractive to me, and I kept going deeper and deeper until one day, I was telling my therapist, "I think at this point, it's more likely that I will be an astrologer than a coach." And it was kind of a passing joke, but it also was not. And I like that tension of, is it a hobby? Is it a passion? Or is it work? Because I think that to keep coming back to astrology or any of these creative pathways, whether it's writing poetry or essays or making music or learning divinatory technologies, consistency isn't really a matter of discipline, but a matter of desire. What you desire, you will be consistent in. And, yes, of course, having structure and rituals and all of these things will help, and yet desire feeds us as artists to keep coming back. And when I kept my desire the side, and I thought that in order to feed my desire, I'll have to feed myself. And in order to do that, I have to do something whether or not I desire it --- I could not I could not connect the dots on how I was going to show up in my business over a long time. It felt more like a means to an end. I kept wanting to support artists instead of be an artist. Because being an artist meant taking a risk on myself and believing that I could be supported to experience creative freedom. And instead, I was finding all these reasons why I wouldn't I wouldn't succeed as an artist entirely.

So I've been so grateful to experience astrology in these beautiful creative ways that it has lit up this fire and passion to learn even more, to learn not just astrology, but to go look at the stars outside and it connects me with the natural cycles of the Earth. It makes me feel like everything is possible if I choose to follow my path and my desire. And it so happens that one of my desires is to support people in feeling this way towards their own charts, to see this cosmic map unfold that makes you connect with yourself in a deep transformational magical way. I also particularly delight in practicing astrology in co-creative ways where one person isn't the expert on any charts. Because you whoever it is that is getting the reading, is an expert in your chart because it's a representation of your own life.

No matter what I learn or how much I learn, I will never have the same expertise that you have on your chart. And so you bring that. I can bring my own ability to look at patterns and connect dots and listen and reflect back to you through my astrological learning. And together, something happens, and we figure out what it all means together. I had this beautiful opportunity to read charts for a few people in my close community who volunteered to be in my, you know, first, chart reading trial — I always try to look for words that are that are not clients because it's so impersonal, but then I'm just kinda searching in my brain for another word —anyway, my friends, they showed up to readings with me, and it was so beautiful. Something that I really love doing is also to, lace a sense of intuitive education, so you learn to interface with your own charts intuitively and that it becomes part of your or your toolkit of how you understand what's going on around you, as well as map out what is upcoming or figure out what happened in the past.

It was so fun, and a couple of people sent me testimonials that they wrote, and it's so rewarding. I made it a point to show up to these not having studied their charts ahead of time. I had looked it up, so I knew I have all the right information, beyond that I got to show up and play with it so that we are, navigating what comes up together. We learned beautiful things in these sessions, and I'm very excited to have astrology be the very first week of the offering that I'm putting together, Illumi9ate, because it's gonna really go into the illusory prisons that we build in our mind, the boxes that we create for how we can succeed, whether it's institutional approval or, what we think we can learn, how if you're an artist you can't succeed — all of these thought prisons that we build up are easily melted away by attending to them and taking this cosmic view of in your chart.

So I hope you'll keep tuning in, and next week, I'll talk about the tarot portion of this program, which will be week two, and, you know, the role that tarot has played in that creative practice. Thank you for listening, thank you for reading, and see you on the Internet 🌈

Hope you are well! This week I talk about the role of patience in building my creative practice and this business, how my Aries ♈ moon despises the wait while my Taurus ♉ sun wants to go slow and build lasting nourishing offerings, and the lessons I've learned over the years on how urgency paradoxically pushed people and opportunities away from me. I talk about how I've learned to embrace both the impatient voracious and the sustaining nourisher parts of myself – by leading with desire and curiosity ❤️‍🔥🔍

Waiting for the blossoms

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Transcript (transcribed via transcribeme):

00:00:01.000 Hi, friends. How are you doing today? I hope you're well. I am excited to come to you today live on audio. Well, it's not live for you, but it is for me. Okay, so I wanted to talk to you about patience today, and it is not one of my core strengths, I don't think.

00:00:31.000 I would much rather be impatient and do things fast. I don't want to do a bunch of research before I buy something. I don't want to measure something like a bunch of times before I hang something up on the wall. I you know don't want to read a recipe before I cook. I would rather just go with the flow, just do the thing, see what happens.

00:01:00.000 Part of me is this way, at least. And then another part of me is very interested in sustainability and doing things that last, doing things that are regenerative, that are created in slow time that aren't urgent. Like I want my work to represent the opposite of hustling, of urgency.

00:01:28.000 But it's also a place that I operate from all the time. And I was thinking about how unaware I was of the ways in which I was actually able to take risks without even thinking about it that, in retrospect, maybe I could have put some thought into it.

00:01:53.000 You know So early on when I left tech to start this business in 2021, I had this kind of projected confidence onto myself.

00:02:08.000 I felt that I needed to show up with a show of strength and determination and assertiveness that my skills in supporting people and working with people needed to be seen and respected by the people who were in positions of power or authority in the jobs that I was working another time who could grant me such a pathway.

00:02:44.000 And I was really looking to them to see and recognize that gift, that skill set in me and just kind of adorn me and adore me and set me up for this pathway. And some of the ways that I showed up at the time, when I think about it, it had actually a lot to do with urgency.

00:03:11.000 I was really feeling this sense of pressure for something to change, for something to shift, for things to break open, to not do that same job over and over again because I was bored or it wasn't entirely fulfilling for me. I wanted to do something else.

00:03:38.000 And it was just such a it was so focused on needing something to change that I don't necessarily feel like I even paused to think what is going to what is actually going to be the Earth part of it. You know How is it going to actually appear in Earth? How is it going to grow? How is it going to nourish and regenerate and be sustainable for me?

00:04:08.000 I wasn't thinking about any of that. I was just like, "I'm ready. Let me do this. Why won't you let me do this?" And then more impatience, I showed up with the people on the other side who were supposedly creating these opportunities for me to display these gifts and talents, like they were less and less inclined to actually do that because I assumed that they just were feeling the desperation and urgency that I was showing up with whether or not even though I wanted the exact opposite, I wanted them to see.

00:04:53.000 And another way that impatience was showing up for me was that I didn't think that I needed to invest years of my life learning and growing into this new shape. I wanted to be already arrived in the new shape.

00:05:15.000 I wanted to prove that I had already done that, and if I could do the job that I was doing then and I was doing it supposedly better than other people, etc., like things that people would tell me, I would take that in and I would say, "Oh, okay. Well, I'm ready.

00:05:38.000 I'm ready already." And you know everyone needs to see me for how ready I am. Funnily enough, they couldn't because the only reason why I am so attached to other people seeing me and doing all this for me.

00:06:09.000 And somehow that will prove to me that I'm doing good and I'm capable, that I will make it as a business person, etc., etc. It was creating the opposite impact.

00:06:44.000 And I might have lost my thread there, but what I'm trying to say is I tried so hard to show up in this way. I was so impatient to get to the end. And I believe that that is a part of why I actually needed to slow down.

00:07:32.000 When I move from urgency, it can be really hard to see the forest for the trees, to see that change and forming a new shape, starting a business, being good at it, getting to a place where I understand how I can bring my skills to work with my people.

00:08:02.000 All of that takes time and effort. And if I wanted to be straight up successful in the very moment that I started my business without doing any of the unlearning and relearning that I've had to do in these last four years or so, then whatever I created would have proliferated the pattern that I already was in.

00:08:34.000 And I don't see how I could have really sustained that. And I didn't. And I had bursts of success. And I love how many organizations and people that I have gotten to work with over the last four years, even though sometimes I might kind of discount it for myself because it happens over a period of time.

00:09:08.000 But when I now look back at the body of work that I've created over time, even if it has been more hidden or happening more in the behind-the-scenes realms, more happening in small group community workshops or in one-on-one work or work that has happened in educational containers.

00:09:36.000 All of it has been instrumental in getting me to a place where I feel a true sense of confidence about how I'm showing up to working with other people and to my own art.

00:10:03.000 And yet that urgency in that moment that I took this leap, I'm also really grateful for that. I'm really grateful that I was able to trust myself to take such a big risk without entirely having a plan for where it will land and how it will go.

00:10:30.000 And I just did it. I did the thing. I'm out. I was not doing the job anymore. And now I could make the changes. Did it go the way I thought it was going to? Absolutely not. It did not go the way I wanted it to go, at least the way I thought it was going to go from that place of urgent impatience.

00:10:55.000 But once I was able to see that I was rushing myself, that I was so attached to my own perception of the pace at which I would succeed and the measure of that success, that everything that I was actually doing, the ways in which it was actually supporting myself and succeeding at taking care of myself and creating space to recover from burnout and working with people.

00:11:39.000 All of these beautiful things would just fall flat on me. And I felt lost and alone and like everyone has forsaken me for things that they didn't actually forsake me for because I didn't even ask them anything. You know I just made all of this up in my head. People didn't even reject me, but if I don't hear something back, I would read that as a rejection.

00:12:08.000 No one is saying to me that I have sent them too many emails or I have posted too many times on LinkedIn. In fact, I didn't post that much at all, especially in the early days of trying to launch offers that you know I launched an offer that only one person signed up for, and it was a group offer. So you know that wasn't a group. So I ended up working with them one-on-one.

00:12:36.000 However, at the time, I remember feeling like even posting once or twice, reaching out to a couple people, it was already a lot for me. I was like, "Whoa, I did all this. I'm so present. People are so aware of what I'm doing. If they haven't signed up, it's because they know that I'm bad and my work is bad.

00:13:05.000 They don't want it." It's like, "How did we even get there?" And that is the growth that I needed to be patient for. You know The growth of it's not a knowledge gap. It's not a matter of having skills.

00:13:28.000 It's a fundamental orientation towards how you show up for yourself that spans everything such that it's so obvious to the people who you're trying to reach out to, whether or not you're showing up from a place of total confidence.

00:13:48.000 Or if you're trying to fake it or you know show up in a way that doesn't entirely read as authentic.

00:14:09.000 And it's something I've been thinking about is how in the before time, like before I transitioned in being seen and socialized as a woman, there was this kind of need to show up and be really assertive and project confidence onto situations because if I didn't do it, my bosses are definitely not going to do it.

00:14:43.000 You know And even if I showed up with assertiveness, I could be told, "Hmm, could you be as assertive as this other dude though?" And I felt really justified in how I was showing up at the time. I was like, "If I don't show up like this, then I'll never get what I want. So you know let's suit up and fight.

00:15:10.000 Otherwise, I won't win." And who was I fighting with, really? Is now a bit lost to me. But I can see why I showed up like that.

00:15:29.000 You know And in retrospect, that wasn't really productive for me because even though those people were telling me things like, you know maybe they'll ask me about you know what experience do you actually have or any of these things, but I would just be like, "Oh, of course, you're going to you know not assume that I can do a good job, that you're going to discount my experiences and my skills, that you're going to look at some kind of paper measure of how good my skills are versus what I have demonstrated through my work.

00:16:11.000 None of that's going to actually matter. You know Self-fulfilling prophecy, as they say, I was like, "You are not going to respect me." And they were like, "Yeah, I'm not going to respect you because that's what you're asking for," right?

00:16:29.000 And I hope you know that, I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that this is literally what they're saying, but that how I'm showing up is creating this kind of subtle dynamic or pattern where I'm actually getting what I'm saying that they are giving to me because that's my expectation of the situation.

00:16:59.000 I expect them to treat me this way, and they do. And there is the one part of, how women get treated this way, marginalized folks get treated this way, people who you know need support and be sponsored in an organization, receive mentorship, be brought into the spotlight and given opportunities for their work without having to self-promote so much because sometimes their self-promotion may not land well.

00:17:45.000 It can be such a double-edged sword for people to get what you want in corporate environments. And I certainly felt that I could only make it work by fighting in those environments. And I would go into everything thinking that I was going to get fought with, and I did get fought with, okay?

00:18:16.000 So anyway, fast forward-ish to fast forward to a couple of years or so later, I'm still kind of, you know at the time, like what do you say? I'm less arrogant. I'm showing up with less external arrogance and more like humble. In fact, I'm almost like the opposite.

00:18:45.000 I have seconded to feeling that I am not as talented or skilled or any of those things that I thought I was, that I could immediately succeed in business, that I would actually need to slow down and study some stuff, etc. And I would still find that there were other ways in which I could be impatient. And that's something I've talked about here before.

00:19:16.000 I was impatient about having people to work with because I felt that when I collaborated with other people, work flew sorry, flows much better for me. And I would get really caught up in that, but I wouldn't realize that another dynamic that would unfold is that I would think, "Oh my God, I'm in a team.

00:19:45.000 All I want to be is useful. And so however I can be useful is good. You want me to do production? I'll do production. You want me to do some transcription, write some stuff. Like I'll do that. I'll do anything so I can be with the group. And then there is somebody who's the hotshot who gets to do all the fancy creative work or something. Like They do what they want, and I'm the one that formats all the documents.

00:20:15.000 You know And once again, I felt like I was being productive in that time, you know but it was coming from this, once again, this need of urgently filling this gap that I had of working with other people.

00:20:39.000 And when I really look at how this has unfolded for me and how I've understood in myself through actually, astrology has been a big part in how I was able to unfold this particular dynamic.

00:21:03.000 My moon is in Aries, my sun is in Taurus, and Aries is a sign that wants to get shit done. And the moon isn't really comfortable there. My sun is in Taurus, which is a very earthly sun where the moon actually is really comfortable, but the sun is like I want to be in the realm of ideas, but instead of being asked to materialize something real in the world, something Venusian, something creative, something beautiful, and nurturing, and the sun's like "ugh". (laughs) So that really made sense for me, like how that dynamic was showing up.

00:21:48.000 And it also allowed me to let go of it. And what I had to realize is that if I want to actually experience the thing that I was going for, which is that something needed to change, etc.

00:22:14.000 I wanted to be in work that I was passionate about, all of that, that I would actually have to follow my desires, my passions. And if I do that, when I do that, I can actually go towards my desire with lots of impatience and urgency.

00:22:46.000 I can read and consume things. I can hop between lots of different spiritual technologies, creative technologies, pathways. I can take a psychology class, and then I can take a tarot class. And all of that can be going at a really fast pace.

00:23:14.000 And yet, the creation, the materialization of the idea in the world, that can still take some time. That can still take some time.

00:23:25.000 And because I can continue to be the person that I am and just kind of like go after my desires really openly and vigorously and interdisciplinarily, then I get to turn around after four years, look around, and say, Wow, I didn't know that I was making a career switch towards these intuitive technologies of astrology and tarot and human design.

00:24:10.000 And I didn't know that I was going to weave my creative practice into it and that I would go from this kind of very structured, formalized coaching approach and working in tech all the way to still wanting to work with lots of different kinds of people while bringing all of these other things that I've been learning out of joy, out of fun, and I've just been kind of in this process.

00:24:44.000 I didn't really mark what the end was. And then I turned around like, "Okay, I have made a career change." And if you had asked me in the beginning, what was going to be my new career, and if you had even tried to suggest to me that it would take me five years or four years or what it was going to take to feel like I knew even what the direction was going to be, not I wasn't already flourishing in it, but I had more certainty in the path.

00:25:15.000 I would have balked. I would have been not even ready to take the step, maybe. And if I had and I did, there would have been so much hesitation and doubt because at the time that I made the change, even thinking about timelines in the future longer than a few months in front of me, even a few months, that was a lot.

00:25:52.000 I was like, "I don't even know what I'm up to this week. This day, let alone in a few years. You mean the earth is going to be around in a few years?" I'm not actually sure.

00:26:04.000 And the amount of world fuckery that we're in and we have been since the pandemic certainly accelerated my thinking towards more nihilism, more expectation or doubt that there will be a future to work towards.

00:26:40.000 It felt so apocalyptic. And now I feel that it is still apocalyptic. The world is worlding. The world is wildly worlding, as you all very much know. And I don't feel that I have to make everything happen in my work, in my creative practice, in no time at all.

00:27:16.000 Because even though I don't know the future, I can see from where I am now that it took me four years to get here.

00:27:34.000 And if there is anything I regret, it is not having more enjoyment, worrying about getting to the end where I was not experiencing any kind of financial distress or instability from the loss of my tech income, etc., etc., so fast.

00:28:07.000 That I was spending so much effort and headspace and time just trying to speedrun through it to jump steps, to rush to the end.

00:28:29.000 When I came in contact with Ayana Zaire Cotton's world-building work and how it's rooted in desire, and we did this I did this free workshop with them initially before I started to work with them through Seeda School.

00:28:48.000 I went to the workshop, and they had this breakdown of what kind of activities are you know that you work with more dominance or force with and that kinds of activities that you work you know maybe from a place of competence and the activities that you work from a place of desire, there's more nuance to it, but I'm seeing the super high level.

00:29:23.000 And I was like, "Oh, these things that I'm saying that I'm working on, like coaching and facilitation, don't even sit in my desire realm as it is right now, in the ways that I'm approaching them right now. And coming into contact with that reflection for myself and then seeing what was in my desire, plans, astrology, stars, dancing.

00:29:52.000 And I was like, "What? Where am I going with all this? But I'm doing this thing that's going to make me money. Once I make the money, then I can be the desired person." No. It turned out that that was not going to work for me.

00:30:11.000 And even in the last year and some, I've gone through you know the last kind of cycle of endings and breakups of the present times to arrive here where I am almost ready to launch this new offer that I'm working on.

00:30:39.000 And it's going to integrate astrology and human design and tarot and poetry. And it's going to be for people who are leaders who are making transitions into your creative practice in big ways. It's been so cool to see how all the threads that I have been weaving have come together.

00:31:09.000 And that instead of feeling anxious about work that might be coming my way, I feel so excited because I know that the things that we're going to work together on are things that I desire to know even more about. I'm fueled by curiosity. And that has been the biggest gift.

00:31:36.000 And it allows me to feel so much more comfortable opening up and continuing to show up in this practice. So patience. It's really hard. It's really hard. And when you take the jump, it seems so antithetical. And maybe it's hard to tell yourself that it's going to take a very long time because maybe it's not.

00:32:10.000 You know Maybe you are ready. And of course, everybody will have different timelines of how these things go. But when it does go slow, it's helped me to see how there's usually a reason.

00:32:38.000 And that reason, as usually, to do with something that I'm not seeing about myself that I need to learn, unlearn, revisit, and get into a solid relationship with.

00:33:02.000 And cultivating the patience for accepting what comes our way through the unpredictability that life is, that change often brings our way, the transitions bring our way. That kind of patience, that's really worth waiting for.

00:33:33.000 All right. So that's all I wanted to say for today. I hope that was helpful. More info on my offer coming soon. I believe I have I'm trying to work with a designer for the last parts. And I met somebody who I believe it's going to be a very cool collaboration.

00:34:02.000 So y'all will hear more about that when we are you know in the next stages. All right. So thanks for being here, as always, folks. I hope you have a good day. And I know there's an eclipse coming up this week, a total lunar eclipse. So take it easy, rest up, chill out. I'm definitely going to try and take it easy.

00:34:32.000 We'll see how that goes for my Aries moon! Take care, y'all, and I'll see you next week. Bye.

Links from this episode:

• Seeda School and Erotic Engineering with Ayana Zaire Cotton: https://seedaschool.com

Thank you for listening, and if you'd like to support my work, I'd love for you to share this newsletter with a friend!🏮🌈

Venus and Jupiter come together in Cancer ♋ today, a once in a twelve year occurence. The last two weeks' astrology has been strongly pronounced in my own natal chart, and has been pulling me even closer to this symbolic cosmic language.

I love that astrology speaks a language with the power of connecting us to place, and the temporal and ecological cycles of the skies we are located under. I wanted to play with writing short love poems responding to images of the night sky through the Stellarium app on my phone interweaved with their astrological symbolisms.

Enjoy, and alchemize your own cosmic love poems from these images and your experiences of this moment, if you so desire 🌟💌

Love poems --- Audio

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Take care and see you next time <3

In this episode, I talk my journey of transforming my relationship to spirit and my spiritual authority/sovereignty. I get into some personal lore on how I am releasing dogma and shame to come home to the joy of my magical gifts and creative desires.

let the magic bloom

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Links to teachers and influences mentioned:

• Cyrée Jarelle Johnson: https://cyreejarellejohnson.com
• The Dream Mami: https://thedreammami.com
• adriennemareebrown's Witch School podcast series: https://endoftheworldshow.org/episodes/welcome-to-witch-school-411

Thank you for being here and happy Leo season 🌞❤️‍🔥 Talk soon!

Hope you are well. This week I'm talking about my forever quandry of having really diverse career interests and wanting to learn everything, and the joys of refusing to choose and reaching for it all.

Interdisciplinary thirst

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Links from this episode:

• Ayana Zaire Cotton and their offering, Permission to Pivot: https://www.seedaschool.com/coaching
• Marta Rose: https://thespirallab.substack.com/

Talk soon <3

I'm back from my trip and getting back to the rhythm of things in home life. This week's podcast is a short voice note with updates from my west coast trip, and the practice continuing to open my voice when it feels like it's closing up on me!

As I mentioned last week, you can now get these episodes added to a podcast/rss app of your choice using the rss feed link: https://kolamcreativecollective.com/posts/podrss/.

Moon jellies and jetlag

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Links from the episode:

• Totem Tales, a 20 minute documentary on the history and significance of the totem poles of shíshálh Nation: https://shishalh.com/video/totem-tales/
• Abolition Pride 2025 in Tkaronto: https://www.noprideinpolicing.ca/
• Disability Pride 2025 in Tkaronto: https://torontodisabilitypride.wordpress.com/

I leave with you with some old mossy tree magic:

Thank you for being here and see you next week :) 🏳️‍🌈💌

I'm at ch'alitch/Sechelt, place of the shíshálh Nation https://shishalh.com/, on Coast Salish land and waters for a few days before returning home.

I've been enjoying doing these podcast episodes the past few weeks, and have made an option for you to add it as a private podcast on a podcasting app of your choice, using this RSS link: https://kolamcreativecollective.com/posts/podrss/. You can find the link on my site too, and if you are having any technical issues, please reach out :)

In this week's episode, I share more tales from my nature observation and budding photography practice, sow seeds for a two part experimental group poetry workshop I'm developing, and talk about how I did a photoshoot on the beach I ended up loving so much –- through the process of doing things the 'wrong' way.

the perfect photograph can never be

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Thank you for listening, and see you next week with more workshop updates!! Sending you love, on the streets and on the couch, this cancer season 🌈💞

This week through my voice I talk about the practice of observing bird kin around me on unceded Coast Salish land, the Great Blue Heron habitat near where I am, the idea of revolutionary mothering seeded through Alexis Pauline Gumbs' edited anthology, and the radical care it takes to choose life and birth my artist self/free creative expression.

I also seed a project that I'm working on behind the scenes, to create a facilitated group art/writing space where we can get curious about our own artistic processes, especially when we struggle to identify with the 'artist' label. More on that soon!

Screaming choose life kadir audio

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Thank you for listening and the kind words y'all send me through text messages and emails! It's so cool to learn about how this format is landing for you and to continue this vocal exploration.

Links from this episode:

• Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams — book, excerpt
• Great Blue Heron baby sounds (you might have to turn up your sound to hear), and up close photos from the lagoon of a heron that I took: https://www.are.na/kolam-creative-collective/great-blue-heron

I leave you with the duck mama and babies, happy Cancer season! ♋ 🌊 🎆

See you next week <3

Happy Pride Month! Another audio episode this week while I am on Coast Salish land, city of vancouver. I spend the bulk of this episode gushing about what it's felt like to be here with the ocean, but I also talk about celebrating Pride month on Davie St, why you might want to subscribe to this newsletter from a non-corporate email address, and coming home to myself.

My voice is a bit sore, so the audio might be a little quiet mid way through, but hopefully it's still clear if you turn up the volume!

why not dance in the park?

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Links to mentions in this episode:

• Ayana Zaire Cotton: Seeda School, For the Worldbuilders podcast episode
• Give Up, album by The Postal Service

And lastly, geese feeding on the shore by english bay beach:

Thank you for being here, have a beautiful week ♐ 🌕 and see you next time!

Cracking my voice open

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Links to people/books I mention:

• Ari Felix : http://thedreammami.com
• Loving Corrections by adrienne maree brown: https://adriennemareebrown.net/book/7450/

And a beautiful pink and gold sunset I saw last month, standing outside my apartment: