The Zen roots of tea with the muse!!

A poem about stepping outside of our comfort zones... and meeting the old woman of the forest. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

This is a reading from my book, Tea with the Midnight Muse, Invocations and Inquiries for Awakening. This one’s called Medicine Woman, and it goes way, way, way, way back to when I was 30 years old. It was at one time published inside of the Mother Tongue Publishing We Moon Calendar.And today I am painting with Havi Mandel, co-director of Red Madonna. And you are still invited to join us for a 13 moon journey in the sacred feminine where you activate your medicine woman. Okay, ready? Ready? Medicine WomanThe wild one lives within all women.She is known as Medicine Woman. She holds the tools for healing in her magic basket. She sings her prayers, you know. Medicine Woman knows stars and sums. She listens between worlds. Medicine Woman cannot be domesticated at all, ever. Even when we don’t recognize her, she is always here.She has blue butterflies and red roses in her hair and golden boots with wings. She’s at the movies with teenage girls on Friday night. She gets a tattoo of the Guadalupe on her left bicep in San Francisco’s Mission District and the Sacred Heart of Jesus on her right bicep.You may catch a glimpse of her silver striped leggings as she roller skates through New York’s Central Park. She teaches workshops on right brain, left brain, the critic and her lover, the muse, or the geometry of numbers or raw food or revolution for breakfast. She pays for everything with cash.She paints glitter on her toenails, fire engine red. Just don’t think you have her figured out. She will always surprise you. She shows up in a crimson dress sewn with a white dogwood bodice and a bay leaf hem. She is the sound of bells. She may let her armpit hair grow.She is the place within all of us that wants it all and wants to give it all up. She swims naked in the ocean. She rides motorcycles up the coast. She paints and writes and dances and dreams and she has multiple income streams. She is medicine woman. She heals the unexpressed in us.She asks the question, who are you not being? Her life is her own. She is on her own and she likes it that way. Don’t be surprised if she asks you to miracle tea and you find yourself drunk with aliveness and honeycomb cake. Shiloh Sophia Today I wish to dedicate this to three incredible members of our teamwho have shown up in extraordinary ways this week. And many weeks, but in particular, right now. The one and only Curate Kelly House. Co-leader of Sacred Echoes, Isabelle Guzman Stark. And live streamer, Vicchi “V” Oleski Thank you. You are all medicine women to me and to our community. And I love you. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Making ritual conscious. First, there are three long spoons laid upon a napkin from Hawaii, handmade on top of a cutting board made by a teenage daughter. A cup from Monet’s garden and the ingredients. First, filtered water in a teapot from New York. First, smelling roses from three beautiful godchildren.Laying out the honey from where I grew up, Lover’s Lane. Grinding coffee, mold free and you beginthe whole thing I learned from a Muse by capitalizing the word Coffee and organizing the ingredients in beauty. Once the coffee has gone into the French press and the water has boiled The rest of the process begins.The scoop of honey goes into the cup. A scoop of coconut oil goes into the cup. Cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla go into the cup and stir the little mash into a ball. When you put the water into the French press,don’t forget to set your alarm for 5.33 minutes, and only then do you froth the half and half. When the time feels right after you’ve looked out the window and pet the cats and pondered your attitude for the day, only then do you add the half and half, the milky foamy substance Into the mix in the cup. And then you stir vigorously, making a slurry of yumminess. (Resist the temptation to drink this elixir.)Make sure everything is emulsified. Look out the window again. Text that one person that you know needs to hear from you, that they are loved. Then stand around in fuzzy socks and breathe deeply as if you have all the time in the world. Smell everything. Love everything.And when the alarm goes off, smile as you gently press down the coffee. But then wait. From here, as you ponder the deliciousness of coffee. Coffee, or what we call Tea with the Muse. You set your tone for the day one more time to an outlook, not just of gratitude, like, hey, I’m grateful for that, but active appreciation, anticipation of bringing beauty and amusement. Call your Muse right then, right before the coffee is ready to pour. She is usually sitting with her group of friends cackling on the dark side of the moon. She loves this dark new moon solar eclipse energy. When you are ready, invite her!Don’t take your eyes off of her as she comes because she may slip through the cracks in the floorboards if she doesn’t quite feel your presence. The quality of your presence in this sacred in this less than 10 minute ritual that will determine whether or not the Muse actually appears.When you call her you know she’s a bit of a fickle one and a bit of a wild one. She demands a quality of presence. She demands ceremonial time. Kairos instead of industrial time and Chronos. The Muse doesn’t have any clocks but the moon. And believe me, she wants to be with you.But she will only appear and only stay if you slow down.Then, pouring it into the cup and stirring again. Then finding the perfect place for you and the Muse to sit in fuzzy socks and fuzzy blankets and recognize you began the day with making ritual conscious and every single other action in this day will be shifted as a result of the quality of your presence. Life is good. As our art matriarch used to say, being an artist is so romanticWith love, Shiloh SophiaWe start this weekend - Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Join me to paint the MUSEDear One, If you happen to have a chronic stress or chronic health condition, please listen because this matters. The hours of your day are not neutral. They’re counting on your body’s clock. Hypervigilance over time wears the body down. You know this, but what you might not know is how much pleasure builds the body back. Pleasure is not a treat. Pleasure is a counterweight to pain. And here’s why I believe it. Chronos. Chronic. It means with time. So if you have chronic health and chronic stress, it means you’re living with it, inside of it. These words come from the Latin and the Greek. When it first began to enter the human language, it was not about a severity, it was about duration, the time it takes. Chronic, on its own, isn’t something bad. It’s what travels with you. But it’s not a singular event. It’s time itself. And if the condition that you are navigating is having an impact on your life. It’s impacting your time. Not just the quantity of your time, but the quality of your time. So what if the remedy to Chronos and Chronic is connected with time itself? Think about this for a moment with me. Chronos connects with the brainwave of Beta, what I call busybody beta, and hypervigilance, and also the critic. The critic lives in Chronos. Chronos is sequential, the clock, the calendar, the appointment, the countdown, the quantity. Beta is the brainwave that runs it. Hypervigilance is what beta feels like from the inside when you live in a body that communicates to you about what it is experiencing in languages that are hard to understand and so unpredictable. When you’re always scanning for what’s next, what’s going to bring on the inflammation or the flare, whether or not you feel like showing up for something that you’ve already said yes to. Small example, yesterday I spent quite a few hours feeling creative and lit up and informed. And then suddenly my computer was out of battery and I was in a public place. And I didn’t feel like expending the energy to get up and plug it in. So I just closed it and just sat there instead. I was weighing whether or not it felt worthwhile to find the socket. Because when you’re navigating chronic conditions, sometimes the simple act like plugging in a cord can feel like you don’t want to do it. Are you, like I am sometimes, weighing every move? The weighing itself, the evaluation is not free. Researchers have measured what it does to a body over the years. And this buildup is called allostatic load. The wear accumulates. And so when we stay hypervigilant and stressed and in the stressful parts of the beta brainwaves over and over and over, it accumulates. It’s a toxic load. Accumulation: Is a word that’s been changing everything for me. Hypervigilance is not waiting for a flare. It’s showing up in the good times too. When I’m doing things that I love, it’s just there in the background. And it fills up peaceful times with stress if I don’t pay attention. But there’s something else. This one has to be chosen. Chronos is Predictable. What is not predictable is Kairos. Kairos is a choice. Kairos is divine time, God timing, supreme timing, synchronicity, everything in right time. Kairos, theta brainwaves, flow state, and the Muse. Kairos is about quality, not quantity. It’s about opportunity, never too early, never too late. It’s the opening. The space to breathe in between, or what I would call Tea with Muse. Chronos is spent. It’s finite. Kairos, you enter and it’s infinite, or at least the experience of it can be when you enter a flow state. Theta is the brainwave that’s operating in Kairos. You don’t just arrive there all at once. You have to pass through other brainwaves. You begin to leave the beta and you pass through the imagination of alpha and into the spacious mystical theta. And as you go. Hypervigilance and stress dissolves along the way. This also counts, especially if you declare that it does. Flow is what it feels like from the inside. Flow is the felt sense of the Kairos state. And this is where science is on my side and the side of Intentional Creativity. The researchers have a name for what happens to time in that state. They actually call it time distortion. It’s one of the defining markers where hours go by and you can’t account for them. You’re so in the flow. You’re in your jam. There’s a theory called transient hypofrontality that says that the self-monitoring part of the brain quiets down during times of deep absorption. The part of you that is over hypervigilant, that guards, that worries, goes quiet, measurably quiet during Kairos. So when you’re in self-expression, particularly things like drawing or painting or singing or weaving or digging in the dirt or cooking food, things that require intention you go into Kairos. When you’re sitting with the Muse and letting her have her way with you. Two hours go by and you don’t even know where they went. That happened just this morning. Coffee with two people I adore. We read poetry from my book, Tea with the Midnight Muse. We did the Mother Mary Oracle Deck and applied it to our health. We talked to the kitties. We talked about the roses and the tomatoes. I made a soup of everything from the garden. And the hours were gone and they couldn’t even believe it. And I said, that? That’s Tea with the Muse. That’s what I want to talk about today. We traveled out of beta and we stopped guarding the parameter of our consciousness. We stopped listening to the Chronos critic who told us we must be productive. We entered the place where there is no clock. Instead, there’s a cuppa.Here’s the interesting thing, is that this time wasn’t about healing something completely, not about overcoming something. When we come back out of it, the same conditions are waiting for us, but our perspective is shifted and we can bring magic out of Kairos into the Chronos. Let me tell you this, the pleasure time, the Muse time, that also is accumulative, just like the stress. The body, the heart, the mind, and the identity, they begin to fill up with a different kind of energy. This is why my entire day is filled with little bursts of chosen micro-pleasure. Chronos, Beta, Hypervigilance, Critic, Finite. That one writes by itself all day long, whether we consent or not, where Kairos, Theta, Flow, and the Muse, and the Infinite, that one only writes in us when we choose it, and also choose to be conscious of it. Kairos offsets days of bracing and worry for the worst. What if Tea with the Muse Is this life-saving as I’ve been saying it is all these years? You might ask yourself, why does Shiloh spend so much time on pleasure when the world is on fire? Because I know what’s possible, because I’ve seen it for myself. I’ve seen people move out of chronic pain and into practices of pleasure that change our world. You know what? Chronos gets the clock. It’s operating all day long. Kairos only gets what we choose and appoint. While you might think that 15 minutes of Tea with the Muse against the rest of the hours spent just fighting the onslaught of overwhelm and chaos: I challenge you to consider this is not just a lovely invitation. For many of us, it’s life-saving. Pleasure is our activism. Kairos, like the Muse, must be courted. Kairos doesn’t just arrive on its own, usually. The only times I’ve seen it come are through falling in love or worshipping at the altar of the Divine. Every other time, I need to choose it. Pain is inevitable, but pleasure is chosen. Kronos never has to be chosen. Kronos is chronic, just like the critic is chronic, keeping you scrolling and reminding you that time is running out. Kairos is a ritual. And while many of us in our community do prefer a giant canvas, in addition, take a walk and let the flowers speak poetry to you. Look out the window at the farthest point you can find and ask what color that is, if you were to paint it. Talk to the part of your body that hurts and ask what it wants. One of the people I was sitting with this morning is navigating a health condition and I asked her to ask that part of her body what the message was. Only one small thing came. But for me, as I sat with her and listened to the space in between the spaces, I heard a very clear instruction about a particular form of rest and I invited her to take that rest today - and she did and she’s doing it right now while I do this. Information comes when you’re having Tea with the Muse. So open the page and give the Muse of Kairos the pen. Ask What wants to reveal itself to you today? Do you believe me that a practice of pleasure could be the counterpoint of a lifetime of pain and could actually be, not just a coping mechanism but a practice to deal with states of chronic health and stress? I know it works. The only question is how much? Will you try? I will. I’ll see you with the Muse. This is Curate Shiloh Sophia for Tea with the Muse podcast and I’m grateful to be in your life. Let’s choose the Muse.Amber and Shiloh Sophia Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Dear Ones, This Sunday - paint flowers with me and the Muses. A daylong paint and sip in Sonoma and virtually. No experience needed - really. Just come. You will have so much fun - there is still time to get cake and rose’ or sparkle water and brushes and a canvas a big as you choose. ~ Shiloh Sophia The Muse May Speak in FlowersMy muse usually shows up in leather, lace, and feathers with rhinestone sunglasses, glinting in cowgirl boots with gold wings. This is how I've come to know her since she made her company available to me. The first time she spoke to me, her language was red-winged blackbird, and pomegranate seeds the color of moon blood on white sheet red. She didn't come with platitudes. She came with instructions and keys. Oh, so many keys to so many doors I know nothing about. And she only occasionally allows me to try one to fit in the lock. She doesn't let me try if I am good. She only offers them if I am willing to be bad. Not bad as in bad versus good, but bad as in badass. Because my Muse is a badass. Yours is too, most likely. She won't offer us her gifts if we stay safe. She always wants a bigger canvas. She always wants a bigger brush. She always wants too much water. Because she told me sometimes size does matter and it would be much better if I painted naked and barefoot. She walks me to my edge and then tips me over Into that muse place where all the colors bend and come alive in me. The place where I remember who I was before all of this heart-breaking open stuff of life. Today, she showed up differently. I haven't seen her quite like this before.She tempted me with an old lure, lightning for breakfast. But then she added soft, full-hipped orgasms in the sunny afternoon, the ones that start at the top of your head and shimmy down to the tips of your red toes. Today, she brought me pain à chocolat. A chocolate croissant from Paris where she dreams me alive. You see, I was there for weeks and now every dream I have is taking place in the streets of Paris where we're all having Tea with the Muse. You see, I haven't been feeling so well. You see, this life has been too busy for me. But it's not her who abandons me. It's me. Who abandons me. Then I can't hear her voice so clearly. The tones, they are muffled. The colors, they are muted. And the riddle is that I cannot hear her if I abandon myself. I cannot hear her speaking in sunflowers speak. For a minute, just a minute, I resisted. I protested. Haven't you seen what is happening in the world?Isn't having Tea with the Muse a frivolity? She rolled her giant eyes, of course, and as she did, I swear dragonflies flew all around her, their wings glistening. Where had they been hiding? Then I started to court her. I courted her when the stars still shone on the waters. I sat in the deep well waiting and looking until the sun shone on my freckled shoulders. When I saw her, of course, I was dazzled. She flirted with black-eyed Susans on her nipples, a star jasmine crown of white, oh, the scent of her, coral-colored roses blooming around her hips, a peony at her vulva, pink with magenta strokes. In her hand, she carried ripe peaches from the tree just right there, and the first pears of the season. There was a long train of geraniums trailing behind her of every color. Hummingbirds hovered around her head and the bees, I could hear them singing as she approached and pulled me from the water and that was whenthe ravens began to sing and cluck. She took my hand and in my hands the seeds of foreign flowers flowed, perhaps flowers from France. She told me that flowers are the language of poetry and that I better get used to hydrangeas that speak in periwinkleand gladiolas that hum in yellow and rhododendrons that talk too much. She warned me: Get your ass to the canvas or else, biatch. I know she threatens when I'm in danger of losing some deeper sense of self. It's just been slipping between the cracks. Or I have been slipping through them.So here I sit, having this Tea with the Muse, feeling the fog depart and the numbing soften. Her hands are on my hands now, clicking and clacking as I attempt to tell you about a visitation from La Muse and I invite you to call upon your own. Hint: She may speak in flowers or ravens or dragonflies. Do not take this visit lightly. Take it from me that without her the well dries up, the colors fade and the belly clenches and the heart moans of longing. The Muse She isn't always right on time. You can't just expect her. She has her own timing.I feel like today I got really lucky. As she took her leave, I could swear I saw Dogwood from last season dancing around her wake. She looked back, winking, her job well done, and I began to laugh. And now to the page. And now to the dance floor. And now to the canvas. Today I shall wear the pink dress and go barefoot, hot pink lip gloss, and I too will be winking right at you.Shiloh Sophia Tea with the Muse is a reader-supported publication. It is free and contributions are lovely for the MUSE! Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Here's what's been on my heart: this is no time to stop creating what matters to you. When the world feels like it's coming apart — when the causes we've worked for our whole lives seem to be coming undone before our eyes — it's so easy to abandon ourselves. To decide that beauty, abundance, a voyage de rêve to Paris, is somehow selfish or beside the point.I'm here to tell you it isn't. We are Co-creators with all of creation, and we must continue to o-create. That is the power we have.In this episode I talk about the difference between the things we can't control — the traffic, the news, who puts their name on an airport — and the one thing we can: our approach to the day. I share why I treat my morning swim as a sacrament, not an indulgence. Why self-expression isn't just nervous-system regulation but a creative spiritual practice. And why, right now, we're going to need to practice pleasure and manifestation right alongside everything else.You're going to have to book it, baby. You're going to have to book the pleasure in.Come take the ride with me. Press play, and I'll see you in circle. Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

Here’s the beautiful tree I’m looking at in France 💗 Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe

It’s my birthday and I’m sharing three gratitudes and three of regrets Get full access to Tea with the Muse at teawiththemuse.substack.com/subscribe