Tag Archives: faith

Calendar Year Reflections

Relationships, spiritual skills, values, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Blog by Valerie
Honour all ancestors – of land, lineage and spirit. Live in balance. This is a steady life’s mission.
And even after years of this commitment, I can still feel profoundly torn at times, like I’m being called to discard a deeply engrained aspect of identity. Coming up lately have been some foundational traumatic experiences that caused me to feel unsafe in the world. My father, an reliable ancestral helper, recently apologised for being cowardly in not tackling his trauma, and I was reminded/warned to keep honouring (demi) goddesses like Freyja, Inanna and Changing Woman. (Image of Changing Woman from a Diné sand painting)
I have also recently gotten the message that I have been doing well to ground on the land here and honour Mother Gulaga. And I have also been aware that I need to continue to do more to honour my totemic responsibilities with earthly non human kin, including supporting healthy marsh habitats and birds (my middle name is Schwan, swan in German, after all). I recently joined a local wildlife rescue group, and I’m visioning additional plants for our dams as visiting herons and ducks have been asking me to make the ‘ponds’ more comfortable for them, as well as water storage for us.
Similarly, I feel the need to honour food and medicine plants more. I’ve been working in the garden here, and collecting and drying herbs for teas and smudging. I have found that small acts can make a big difference; that plants and animals have pretty endless compassion and low expectations of us humans, and each intentional act of honouring is noticed.
Strengthening social connections honours our ancestors too. I heard someone recently refer to reading the news as a vice. I don’t see it that way. I see it as a social responsibility to the collective to do my best to hold compassion, give grace and send love each morning when I read ‘the news’. I am also in the process of becoming a citizen of Australia to deepen my social commitment where I am now.
We said goodbye to our dear Chloe last year, and welcomed a couple of cute guinea pigs. We are ready to let another dog into our hearts and home.
Nurturing my self, child, partner, and friends, sharing my medicine with community, and stabilising our survival and well-being continue to underlie all of these activities. I look forward to further home schooling and home steading, and Earth Ethos-ing with Jos and all of you reading this.
May you and we all be healthy and well and live even more fully and authentically in this time we refer to as the year 2026.
Reflection: What life’s mission is steadying your journey?
giveheartIf you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving.

Trickery of heartfelt words

culture, decolonising, healing, relationships, spiritual skills, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Blog by Valerie

Many of us are familiar with the four (or five) agreements concept of spiritual teachings Miguel Ruiz wrote about based on ancient Toltec wisdom. The first is: Be impeccable with your word. It is much easier to be tricky with our words than our actions. Actions require lack of awareness, sneakiness or even betrayal at times to follow through on a trick, whereas being tricky with our words seems to have become so common that it’s often forgotten a few minutes after we’ve done it.

Unless you are in intimate relationship with someone like me who has an elephant’s memory for words. Growing up, watching how well someone’s words were aligned with their actions helped me judge how safe I was with them, because my home environment was so dangerous and my nervous system so often triggered that I couldn’t rely on feeling safe in my body to discern which people were safe to be around. Even now in my forties after years of estrangement from my family of origin and many healing experiences, I am still uncovering layers of feelings of unsafety and relational dynamics where I was tricked because I loved someone and gave too much benefit of doubt when they told me something I wanted to hear and their actions didn’t quite align…

I had a conversation with a friend about colonisation a few years ago, and she said an elder told her that the British didn’t have superior manpower or military strength when they invaded; they overpowered the people with their words. I have written before about unconscious sorcery, and it continues to be something I experience and witness regularly. But this blog is about the way we use our words, and the tricks our minds play on us and those we love when we believe what we say (at least in the moment).

I have had experiences with people who are in their hearts in a moment, but then dis-ease such as Wetiko takes over and their minds get to work changing the story and tricking them. How many of us say something and mean it in a moment, then think about it later and realise we don’t still feel that way, then go back and correct it with the person? It’s hard to do that. And yet those words sit there, and we may not realise how much of our relationship is built on them and the emotional power they possess.

I see this as one of the greatest tricks playing out right now in the world; on a big scale, there are people saying things like: “[Y]ou always want to go with what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart” about Donald Trump’s incongruent words and actions. On a small scale how many of us say “I’m good” when asked how we are, when in fact we do not feel good, or at least not wholly so. It took me a few years to work out ways of navigating these interactions gracefully in shops and places where people are meaning to make small talk but I don’t want to smile and lie and build that energy into my day. I find saying something I  like tends to work, e.g.: “How are you today?” “I’m appreciating the sunshine outside.” “Oh yes, it’s a hot one.” (Image from here)

Some friends have told me I expect too much from people. That bums me out, because I don’t expect more than I ask of myself. Others say, just take people at their word and decide if they’re safe or not based on actions, but it feels too harshly black-and-white to me to put people into categories labelled ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’.

I had a conflict with a friend many years ago, and we talked about it and made up, but I felt insecure with her for years afterwards. When I brought that feeling up a few times she told me I was being crazy; then when another conflict arose and I said I felt hurt by some of her behaviour, she immediately brought up our conflict from five years prior and said she had forgiven me for that so I had no right to bring up something else, I had to just forgive her as well. I certainly didn’t feel forgiven! I felt like my insecure feelings had unfortunately been vindicated. A few months later when she wanted to meet and put everything behind us, I felt like I couldn’t trust her anymore, so there was no point. Without the potential for building trust, I can’t feel safe in a relationship. So even thought it really hurt, I had to let it go.

I do believe that she believed she had forgiven me. And I don’t know if she didn’t know how to or what the block was, but when it became clear she was still upset about the first conflict and was denying it, I lost hope for healing together. And that friend who talked about colonisation being a conquering of words, well, she conquered the doors to my heart with some powerful words that it turns out were not impeccably used. I can accept that we both were tricked in good faith, and I can rebuild trust by talking about it, so the words between us change and we can do our best to be more impeccable this time around. The responsibility of using our word belongs to each of us to co-create a healthy world together! (Image from here)

giveheart If you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving.

Spiritual Secret Sauce

healing, Indigenous science, spiritual skills, values, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Blog by Valerie

Over the years I have observed a number of spiritual seekers looking for a ‘secret sauce’ solution to their lives – some kind of trick or program that, if they followed it, would lessen their pain and make their lives look more like what they have in mind. I have numerous times had the experience of being ‘tried on’, sometimes for a few months, sometimes even for years. But when one is looking for a secret sauce, spiritual practices from any tradition will inevitably disappoint. Yes, some ceremonies or practices may resonate so deeply, even profoundly altering our life direction with deep healing in a moment or over a short period of time. But if we continue to seek ‘pow’ experiences, we will end up chasing the dragon on a hopeless, addictive journey. 

An important spiritual ‘pow’ I experienced when I was trying to move through suppressed childhood trauma that had come up in my late 20s. I did four ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon, followed by a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat in Chile (without warm enough clothing!); I felt for weeks afterwards as if my brain had been shaken like a snow globe. I had done that on purpose to move the trauma through my life over years instead of decades. I remember sitting in a hotel room in Peru and painting pictures, then ripping them up and reassembling the pieces to reflect myself. Life was very intense for more than seven years as a result of the pace at which I chose to ride that wave of energy, and miraculously Lukas rode through it with me, often saying he felt like he was barely holding on. I am glad to have moved through much of that trauma. My most recent spiritual ‘pow’ experience was the birth of my daughter. She turns three this year, and I feel like my nervous system is calming down from what the birth brought up. 

Last year someone who tried me on started working through my book, and after three weeks said to me they were done doing spiritual work because they weren’t seeing enough changes in their life. I was pretty stunned that this person was expecting such a short ‘pow’ turnaround in their life with so little effort. When I was very unwell in my 20s and finally found a naturopath who diagnosed the pathogenic bacteria in my gut, I remember her saying that with three years of drastic diet limitations and careful, targeted supplements I could expect to feel better. That sounded good to me as I considered how many years had led to my system becoming so sick. And it turned out to be true. (Image from an art installation in Sydney in 2020; sorry I don’t remember the artist!) 

These days I like to think about how long it takes a plant to establish its roots underground, all the nourishment required to even make it to the surface, and then the years of growth and renewal and moving through disease. I told that person that some seeds I had planted in my life over a decade ago were only starting to bear fruit for me now, and that I had been doing some of the same daily spiritual practices such as altar work and seasonal ceremonies for longer than that. Unfortunately, that person has become very dis-spirited, and I hope they find a way out of the dark hole they’re in. (Another photo I took at Angkor Wat years ago of an amazingly resilient tree)

It seems to me that a real spiritual ‘secret sauce’ is made up of persistence, patience, a daily practice, trust and faith in something(s) bigger than ourselves who care to help, commitment to core values that are worth living and dying for, grit and determination to stay the course, and a sense of humour.

giveheart If you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving.

Clean & Dirty Pain

Culture, decolonising, healing, relationships, spiritual skills, values, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Blog by Valerie

I recently came across the concepts of clean and dirty pain. This is a well written deep dive if you want to read it before I share my perspective. I’ll describe it as follows:

    • Clean pain is when we accept and move through what life gives us in fullness of emotions and experience; and
    • Dirty pain it when we resist, deny, and layer shame, blame and guilt on top of the pain life has brought us so that we multiply our suffering and so as to punish or even torture ourselves. (Image from here)

It’s been my mission for some years now to honour all energies, feel all feelings, and witness all thoughts with acceptance, love and compassion. It’s been especially important this week as we’ve been a target of some online abuse, as well as rejection from a few people we care about who have become bogged down in shame. I am used to being a presence that some people find it hard to be with, but that doesn’t make it easy! I have purposely been to many dark spaces, and I have honed some fierceness through some soul-wrenching boundary-setting, and I understand that not everyone wants that mirror. Yet more and more of us seem called to move through intense pain, and it seems at times that our only choice is how clean or dirty will the path we take be.

I think about how those who are brave enough to share something soul-led, something real, in a world that is so often about superficial image and illusion, in a world that is so quick to judge, to dismiss, to be outraged and unkind, are those who will save this world…To be able [] to be ourselves, to share of ourselves, to have access to the dark parts of Self to bring forth what we will from our personal Underworld is perhaps the point of the human quest, or at least one of the main bullet points.–Mary Shutan on Facebook

I’ve written a few times about trauma being neurobiologically encoded in our brains at the intersection of disgust/aversion and terror. That Western science knowledge has really helped me to judge when I need to move through something painful and when I’m potentially re-traumatising myself. After many years, I now feel like my instincts and flow are trustworthy. It makes the pain a lot easier to be with when I trust that it’s valuable, and I trust when I feel moved to shy away or go into it directly.

Accepting clean pain might sting for a day or two, but it doesn’t linger or fester.

So, to the people who have been sharing disrespect and rage with us recently, we feel your pain and pray that by grounding your projections and reflecting compassion back as best we can, that you are able to feel something more than overwhelm.

And we want everyone to know that however overwhelmed you feel in a moment, you’re not carrying it alone. With thanks to Shannon of Providencia Waco for sending us this song by Alexandra Blakely, we invite you to close your eyes and receive this musical medicine:

giveheart If you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving.

Honouring lack

healing, Indigenous Science, relationships, values, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Blog by Valerie
It is autumn here, and at the recent equinox we did a ceremony of thanksgiving. I like to read the Thanksgiving Address of the Haudenosaunee peoples. I find it really beautiful. We also asked for a few things, which later felt wrong to me, like it was the season of giving thanks for what we had, not to plant seeds and ask that they grow; so we did another ceremony expressing gratitude for what is working for us related to the area of life where we asked for change. That felt more balanced.
Lack of Support and Destruction of Health and Life - Symbolized by Word ...As much as I have and am truly grateful for, this experience highlighted how much lack is in my life at the moment. I started to reflect on that. I realised that I have had a belief that ‘I always have what I need’, and so if something isn’t present in my life, then I must not need it. But that belief doesn’t feel like it is honouring my life. It feels like trying to reject or mentally trick myself out of being in lack. In new age-y and positive psychology thinking, ‘light’-ness is privileged, and we are pushed to look at the bright side. There is value to that, but not, in my opinion, if it feels forced or rejects our lived experiences. Sometimes life feels heavy and dark, and it’s important to make space for that. (Image from here)
Dams and water supply schemes suffer due to lack of rain | Utility MagazineOn the planet right now, so many plants, human and non-human animals are lacking safety, security, healthy food, clean water, shelter, etc. Why would I be any different? I would expect there to be some lack in my life given our collective environment. Lack teaches me to appreciate what I have, and to cherish what comes into my life when lacks are transformed. (Image from here)
There are some areas of my life where I feel so deeply in lack that I feel pain and impatience even as I experience them healing. It is as if I’m coming from so far behind what I need that I can’t yet relax and feel at ease that it’ll keep going in a healthy direction. I need to keep it on my radar to pray about and act to improve within my power.
lack-of-motivation | Born RealistAs I am still breast-feeding and being a full time carer, Lukas has been looking for employment for a few months. That struggle has brought stress, fear, and lack for both of us, along with moments of finding deeper faith and trust, as well as gratitude and joy for extra family time. Another example: the more I parent my toddler, the mirror of my own childhood continually brings up grief and lack for me to be with, along with the joy and relief of breaking patterns as best I can by giving my child what I didn’t receive. (Image from here)
The love of money. stock image. Image of crumpled, quarter - 76482929In the Jewish family and the secular capitalist culture I was raised in, people believed not in reciprocity and gift economy, but in transactions. As a non-Zionist Jew, my understanding from my family was to place faith and trust in accumulating gold, jewelry and money for survival, not land, because we could carry those things with us if we were forced to move. They saw me as a commodity too, which felt incredibly de-humanising. It confused me for a long time, how I could feel so much love and pain at the same time. It also existentially denied my spiritual gifts and strengths. But that’s how they saw the world and what they believed in. And I’m not in the business of trying to change anyone’s beliefs but my own. Beliefs are very personal things. (Image from here)
So I have decided that I no longer believe that I always have everything I need. It feels untrue and unkind to carry that belief. I believe my responsibility is to discern my needs as best I can and act within my power to meet them; and that dignity requires me to honour Life by allowing all energies that arise within me to be celebrated. At the moment, that means honouring lack, and so here’s my blog celebrating that. I hope you find value in it.
giveheart If you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving.

Faith, hope & trust

Values, , , ,

Blog by Valerie

Talking with a few people this week, it seems timely to share my perspective on these concepts and how I work with their energies. Though there can certainly be overlap between them, I hope clarifying the way I think about and hold these is helpful for your own thinking.

  1. Faith

I experience faith as a big, deep energy. Words that relate closely faith for me are ‘reliance’, and ‘belief.’ I experience existential fear to be a flip side of faith. When I have discerned that the fear I feel is existential and not due to being in imminent danger, I lean into faith and practices that support me to maintain and heal it. I am relishing this Michelangelo quote of late, reminding myself to have faith that everything happens at the right time. 

michaelangelo quote

Where we place our faith can have huge consequences for our life experiences. For example, if I place my faith in getting THIS JOB I applied for, that is setting myself up for a big crisis if I don’t get the job, or if the job doesn’t work well for me. If I instead place my faith in something bigger like ‘the right job finds me at the right time’, then if I get the job I may breathe a sigh of relief, and if I don’t, it will likely be easier to accept and wait for something better.

I have found that placing faith blindly leads us to be let down, and even lose faith in faith altogether, leading people towards nihilism. You can live in nihilism if you want, but having spent time there and with people who are choosing to be there, I found it too bleak and painful. If placing faith in certain things supports me to live a more fulfilling life and embody my core values (peace, play & passion), then I will do so. I think the below quote is a good warning sign for loss of faith altogether, and I think it often comes with over-placement of faith into things, then experiencing existential crises, and not knowing how to work with faith in other ways so giving up on it entirely instead.

disbelief in magic

My view is that faith ought to be grown through an iterative process. We place faith in something (I suggest starting with an affirmation that feels good, like ‘Life is always here for me’ or something to that effect), then we see how it feels to live with faith in that space, and when it is challenged whether it would feel better or worse or neutral to place more faith there or elsewhere. Placing faith in life always being for my benefit has been very beneficial for me – so that even when hard things happen, I look for the lesson in letting go and the space for new support and adventure that is seeking to come through. Placing faith in this also ensures that I limit identification as a victim. Even when I AM victimised in some way, I do not take it to an existential level, because I choose to place faith in there being an important teaching (or two or three or twenty) in my experience of victimisation. 

Faith, for me, is something we build through an iterative process over time that supports us to navigate the mysteries of life.

2. Hope

obama-hope-shelter-copyI see hope as a more fleeting, softer and elusive energy laced with personal egoic desires. I might choose to have faith that the right job will come to me at the right time (which will likely require me to do a bit of work putting myself out there), and if I feel excited about a particular job I just interviewed for, I may HOPE that will be the one that comes through. This is why I found the energy of Obama’s Hope & Change campaign less exciting than many people. I feel like many people placed FAITH in his presidency resulting in meaningful change instead of HOPE, and thereby set themselves up for huge disappointment (Image from here.)

Hope is a smaller, lighter, more specific energy that I associate with words like ‘wish’ or ‘desire’. The best way to use of hope is to express more specific desires and wishes without expectation or attachment to results.

3. Trust

Trust, like faith, is a big energy for me. Where faith relates to my interactions with the unknown, trust relates to the constants in life that I can rely on, things ‘I know’. Trust relates to truth for me. I trust that the sun will set tonight and rise tomorrow. Trust for me, is a ‘knowing,’ which can be something we just have or find within ourselves. In Buddhism people refer to ‘transmission’ of certain ‘knowings’, meaning that if you find a ‘truth’ within yourself you can project that into someone else when they are open and receptive to it and awaken that truth in them. 

One of my mother’s favourite phrases was ‘Trust but verify’, which to me means there is no trust at all, by design. When I expect not to be able to trust, there is no room for trust to grow. But if I start by being willing to doubt myself about this, then I am open enough for some hope, and then maybe some faith to come into my life. And faith can become trust as we learn that we can rely on certain things. I grew up feeling that life was hard, and that someone was always out to get me (that was true! I was being abused!). But as I grew up and moved out on my own, I dared to hope life could be better than that. Then I dared to place faith in the idea that life was always for my benefit and there was a positive purpose to all the pain and trauma I’d been through. At first that was an idea, but then I started to see it and experience it more and more. Over time my faith was challenged, and still I kept being able to come back to that idea, and over time it has become a truth for me. I am now able to trust it. And when I met someone who doesn’t have that knowing, I can see  them because of the journey I have been on.

As I stay true to myself – by being authentic and following through on my words with actions (even inside the little agreements I make to myself in my own mind – I am able to build trust with myself and be a trustworthy person. That allows me to build trust with another person, even someone who has struggled to be around trustworthy people. Sometimes I don’t follow through on my word, or my words run away with me and I have to chase them and either apologise and make amends or do things I would rather not or at a pace that is not very smart. But in moments when I  am able to help awaken other people from a myth that they are an eternal victim in their own life, that no one and nothing is trustworthy, then I experience the gift of that journey, which helps makes the painful betrayals I’ve been though feel worthwhile.

4747714-James-Baldwin-Quote-Trust-life-and-it-will-teach-you-in-joy-and

giveheartIf you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving. 

Gifts of Colonialism

Decolonising, Healing, Indigenous Science, Values, , , , , , ,

Blog by Valerie

When we grow up feeling like no one’s in our corner, that life is us against the world and we can’t trust anyone, many of us go on a journey as adults of learning how to put ourselves first and practice self-care and fiercely healthy boundaries, as well as learning about personal limits of meaningful sacrifice and resentment-building martyrdom. Sometimes those of us with this wound feel the pain of it so acutely that we can’t focus on much else. We need the wound to heal so badly that we start to believe our needs matter more than others’, and like a baby crying to be taken care of, we often look for external care-taking even as adults, which tends to result in giving our power away and ultimately feeling victimised, reinforcing our distrust wound over and over again. People say when we don’t learn a lesson at a small scale, the universe keeps providing the lesson in bigger ways until we get it or it gets us. When this happens at a large scale, where many people share such a wound that it becomes an intergenerational trauma, entire families, cultures, and communities can collectively reinforce the wound in each other and embed it into social structures. (Image from here.)

TRANSCEND MEDIA SERVICE » Colonial Mentality

There are spiritual lessons in everything, and I’ve been thinking recently about the following teachings of colonialism:

  • corruption of power – giving us the opportunity to recalibrate how we view, carry and share power and re-order our social structures and governance;
  • corruption of trust – giving us the opportunity to let go of control within a separated individual identity to flow into a communal and interconnected identity;
  • corruption of belonging – giving us the opportunity to heal the wound of abandonment by feeling the grief and loss of disconnection from the Earth and allowing us to seek adoption by the country and traditional owners where we live;
  • corruption of faith – giving us the opportunity to re-place our faith into the creation of new cultures and institutions inclusive of all human and non-human kin to fulfil our special (species-specific, or speci-al) role as caretakers of this planet.

I’ll share a few stories and thoughts about each of these gifts.

Mahatma Gandhi Quotes Power | das leben ist schön zitate

Power: When power becomes too concentrated and reaches a human limit, people tend to explode out of their lands like volcanic lava and end up scattered all over the world spreading stories about how they didn’t steal or impose on others, ‘they conquered’ and ‘won’. Any superiority trip (an existential hierarchy) is corrupt, and it seems to me that over successive generations (such as after a colonial land grab), the nature of power becomes apparent to more and more people and passion for social justice activism and Indigenous knowledge revival emerge to re-balance us.

Trust: As a child, I didn’t have anyone around me I could fully trust, and I never felt safe because I wasn’t. I trusted untrustworthy (ill, innocent and/or naive) people as a survival strategy. So I learned trust through experiencing deep betrayal. It has been a powerful mirror of what not to do. Today I’m a highly sensitive person with increasingly fierce boundaries, and I find the fiercer my boundaries, paradoxically the gentler I am with people close to me. Seeing trust as a path and practice, as opposed to a given or a ‘should be’ taught me that it can be learnt and earned. And it showed me that at times I need to extend trust for practical reasons even if it feels dangerous, and at times that I can hold it back to protect myself from painful experiences. (Image from here)

Belonging: More painful than my wound of sexual abuse is my wound of maternal abandonment. I have felt for most of my life like I cannot cry enough to express this profound grief and pain. Lately, though, there are moments where I can hold this gift with awe. Last week I met a Walpiri lawman Wanta Jampijinpa Steven Patrick who has worked for years to share his understanding of Ngurra-kurlu (the home within) with his people and others. He told me the metaphor of Milpirri (see below), a festival he facilitates in the community of Lajamanu in partnership with a dance company in Brisbane every two years: the hot air from their desert country rises up, and the cold air from the sky falls down; as the air mixes, thunderclouds are formed that unite the energy and send lightning and rain to the earth, connecting the hot and cold air (the Aboriginal/yapa country, knowledge and culture and other/kardiya knowledge and culture from overseas). He asked me why so many people who come to his community want to share their culture and knowledge and do not learn from him so they can be adopted where they live and “we can all be Australian.” (Image from here)

Will There Be Faith? | Peg Pondering Again

Faith: Though growing up I was ostensibly taught to have faith in Western governments and their supposed ‘democracies’, capitalist markets, cleverness of mind, quick-wittedness, physical beauty, and a watered-down version of Jewish law, I steadily lost (or never placed) my faith in those spaces. Instead, I learned to have faith that peace can emerge from any violent conflict; that all trauma be healed; that there is value to experiencing evil, disgusting, and dangerous things. As Dr. Marcus Woolmbi Waters, a Kamilaroi man, wrote in his most recent column in the Koori Mail entitled Let’s not lose sight of who we are: “I am no victim of colonisation…We are survivors, enduring and ancient, who maintain a fight for justice and truth…Yes, our trauma is deep, it is intergenerational, it is historical and resides deeply in the present, but we are not our trauma” (emphasis added). (Image from here)

I am reminded of one of the biggest gifts of colonialism that we are still unpacking: a conscious awareness that we are all one big human family despite our diverse countries, cultures, communities and the conflicts between us, and that we are all in this together, human and non-human, in holy commun-ity. (Image from here) In the immortal words of Johnny Cash:

giveheart If you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving.