The Underworld, Myth and Beauty: Individuation

I’m dropping in this week to hold you in deep encouragement, steeped in love and unwavering support. We are in strange times, that’s nothing new, and there’s a feeling that more change is coming, new transitions are starting to take shape on the horizon. And we are moving toward them. New ways of relating to self, other energies, daily life, work and purpose are all opening up. New love wrapped in new potential is coming through. It feels like the unknown, and we may be navigating something that feels wholly muddled right now. We need to feel encouraged, and I’m here this week to fill this need. We deserve to be wrapped in a comforting blanket of reminders that this isn’t all there is. That it’s ok to change forms, and change forms again. It’s ok to let go, be free, embrace a life that feels so different from what has been. Let my voice be your guide. Let my love light your way. Listen for these five minutes. And then, if you need to, listen again. I’m here, and I love you, deeply. I cherish your sacred journey. Medicinal blessings, Kristi

Ahh, Mercury Retrograde, that often mentioned astrological phenomenon. This occurrence gets tossed around a lot, often with the joking question of "Is Mercury in retrograde?" attached to it. But what does it really mean? I am answering this question from a symbolic and energetic focus, offering language around what the significance is when a sky body appears to move backwards. Hint, all bodies in motion affect other bodies, including our earth mother body, and our own human bodies. Mercury as a symbol represents the mind, communication, and intellectual processes. We use these processes to create relational energy and experiences. When mercury is retrograde, we are given the time to retreat, review, reimagine, and remember what we have been creating, with a deeper intensity. When used with intention, it is a fruitful time to close loops, and revisit past happenings to let them go once and for all. With the sacred numerology of 3 as a support during a retrograde, we are in a position to retreat and allow the life/death/rebirth cycle to come full circle. This is a very potent process, and it often asks us to be committed to our own rest and retread in order to allow it to fully land and integrate something that is asking for our embodiment. Where in our lives do we feel this call? And how are feeling this lately? What themes in our lives are recurring, coming up again, or having another go? Let the retrograde motion be your teacher and your guide to greater purpose, freedom and liberation from past experience, old choices, and outdated programming. Blessed to have you here. So much love to you. Retrograde blessings, Kristi  Show Notes: Check out the Embodied Astrology Podcast with Renee Sills for a deeper dive into this season's astrology

This week, I am joined by my friend and very wise woman, Kathryn C. Robinson. Kathryn is a beautiful, mellifluous being, who (you will hear!) expresses her unique essence and earthbound medicine through use of her voice. She is a movement and body-based practitioner who focuses her expressions on helping others unearth and release trauma often experienced (or expressed) by grief in its many forms. She uses various therapies, such as yoga, kirtan, and meditation, and her musical background and talent employs her into a wider range of modalities, including sound and vocal expression to help regulate and discharge emotional material from an individual essence. During our conversation, she takes us on a bodily journey; one that brings us to moments of hallelujah in the body. Though we can experience great pain, she urges us to understand that anytime we access and move emotion from within, it is deep cause for praise and celebration, as the result is a piece of the Self being returned, renewed and restored. From our own grief stories, to the empowered agency we can create from the physiological awareness generated by body based practices, you will find yourself having more than just a moment with your own grief. Our time together in conversation is one of reckoning, recognition, and true release, leading to wider understanding of our own expression and power.  In our conversation, we discuss:  yoga as a practice of self-inquiry  resistance and blocks to meditation and what may actually be behind them  latent, compounded and unprocessed grief  how our culture discourages evolution by encouraging bypassing  invitations to the internal  deep intimate self-relationship  moving energy in order to truly move into relaxation  using romantic relationships to perpetuate first family dynamics (first family feedback/trauma loops)  using a body-based practice to move through flight/fight/freeze nervous system patterns  storing experiences on a cellular level  liberating and freeing the voice  expressing the ineffable through sound  what it can mean to live cleanly  power in the act of witnessing  If you are ready to explore these themes and more in a loving conversation, please join us. We love to have you hear.  Show Notes:  Find Kathryn on her website at http://www.kathryncorinne.com ; Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health; Quote by Tara Brach; Quote by Mister Rogers; Musician who taught the class we met in is Peia;, Also mentioned were  David Kessler, Grief Expert and author; Paul Denniston, Grief Yoga Practitioner, 

Welcome back to the show for my solo jam on how some very heavy energy is moving through (the already dense material of) bodies lately. There is a palpable set of challenging energies in the collective atmosphere, and they are coalescing and manifesting through each of us as individual bodies and unique essences, taking shape in different (and most likely relational avenues) in our lives. What a challenging time it has been for many of us. Some of us may have been feeling this ramped up challenging energy already back in Leo season, and many of us (myself included) are now experiencing the very strong disruption of these manifesting energies in the form of very real earthbound challenges. In this episode, I am taking us through a conversation that helps us name our challenges, and invite the awareness we need to stay on the middle path of balance and self honoring as we feel the disruptive nature of life on Earth at this moment. It is a great, alchemical, evolutionary time, and if you are wondering how you're actually feeling because it seems almost indescribable, I will encourage you to allow the deep biological and physiological processes to unfold as they are. It may feel like an emotional apocalypse somedays. The key to our survival, and ultimate liberation, is to be with it. Take your time. Honor your body's responses and be curious about them. Notice where your breath is shallow, notice where it has space to be deep. Connect to the patterns of your nervous system. We can do all of these things by taking space from all that the external world is trying to force us to hold, and being with the world within that is asking for restructure. It may feel like structures inside are truly crumbling. Hold yourself with grace as this happens. None of our experiences are binary, so we can hold ourselves open to what is beyond what we know. There is always more than just what we see presently, and when we tap deeper into presence, we can take a greater agency in our choices, even in the heaviest of experiences. The outcomes, at this moment, are fully internal. What are we in service to when we make our choices? And where are still too entangled to feel like we even have a choice? We will explore all this and more through a spiritual and embodied lens in our conversation this week. Blessed to have you join me. Sending so much deep love and support, Kristi 

Recorded on the second full blue Moon in Aquarius of Leo season 2021, this episode is here to help you move and process this momentous amount of energy that many of us are feeling right. We are at a critical point, a pinnacle, in our lives. We are like writers with pen posed, ready to create that first line of the next chapter. This is the line that draws us in and sets the tone for the story. The one that gets us excited and passionate about what comes next. We have been working towards this moment for quite awhile. And now, the energies we are coalescing are ready to bring a culmination of changes in the earthbound realm. Look around. What do you see happening in your life? What have you been asking for? Can you see parallels between the two? Are you asking for signs and guidance? And are you spacious and open to receive them? Remember that the universe often speaks in a whisper, a subtlety, a small genauere. And if we tune in, and pay attention to the unity between heart and mind (instead of spinning out on the mental plane alone) and get back into our bodies (somatic experience), we will be able to see in the environment around us, and our internal, intuitive eye will be open as well. This is the power we need to move forward into a more liberated, peaceful state of being. In this moment, something is landing. And we have the power to bring it in and build upon it beautifully. Amen. Deep love and blessings for this experience. Thank you for being here. Love, Kristi

There is a lot of energy coalescing right now. Here, on the continent of North America, fires are raging, consuming land and structure, billowing smoke for miles. Covid cases are increasing, sickness is spreading. Human life is being disrupted and displaced. There is grief. The energy is fraught. On a personal level, relationships are breaking down, partnerships are ending. Concepts of home, family, love and stability are changing. We are reaching critical moments in our collective and individual experience. Things have been set into motion, are culminating, the wheel of life is turning. Our hearts and minds are being barraged with a momentous amount of information, sensation, feeling, and newness. Our minds may be grappling to navigate, to get us to the next answer. To help us hold on to something. Our hearts may feel disconnected, overwhelmed, broken, or displaced. In this episode, instead of offering anything more for you to take in, I’m inviting you to join me in a space of meditation so that you may feel into, take in, and process what is already there for you. I’m offering a journey that will take you deep into the heart’s space of your embodied being, of your Holy Spirit self, of the symbols of this powerful entity. We will work with the breath, the heart, spine, and mind in an embodied way, as well as a poetic, symbolic way to help us see our experience as our inner worlds wish us to. These set of moments are for you. Come as you are. Stay for a sound bath from my singing bowls. Be blessed by the information, or the sense of peace, or whatever it is that comes through for you in this time. I am offering journaling questions at the end as a way to further this practice and bring you into a conversation with your innermost and honest self. If you need the time and sacred space to sit and breathe, experience, witness and feel, this one is for you. Love you all. ~Kristi

Welcome back to the show! After a few weeks hiatus, we are here on the New Moon in Leo, 2021, to share thoughts on a few patterns that dance around in our lives together: avoidance, which I define as not making the choice to orient towards something we know we need to; bypassing, which is what happens when we repeatedly move away from situations that ask us to learn from them; and ghost culture, which is what we get (presently) collectively from the pervasive individual patterns of avoidance and bypassing. We’ve all done it—actively ignored or shut out a person or situation we didn’t want to confront. We’ve ghosted and been ghosted. But what are we really doing when we make those choices? In this episode, I am revealing the ways in which we leak our power when we make the choices to avoid, bypass and ghost. We disempower ourselves, and we disempower others. And many of us are doing this without even realizing just how much energy is being leaked from our own reservoir when these habits rule our decisions. Here and now, we are presented with some new awareness of our own agency, and the power to choose ways of closing cycles, connections, and circumstances that leave us fuller, more aware of our own compassion, and more deeply steeped in our own medicinal nature. Bring your open heart and your open mind, and let’s jam together. Love, Kristi Show Notes: the book I mention is called Existential Kink, by Carolyn Elliot, PhD. Get in touch with me to share what’s on your mind or in your heart email: [email protected]

This week on the show, I am taking us into the lessons of grief: what it means to grieve, what we are actually doing and creating when we grieve, and how we are reckoning and retrieving pieces of ourselves and our power through the cycles of grief. Grief is a practice that takes us further through the doorway of our own medicine. The essence of it as a practice brings us to the understanding that we must grieve, and grieve fully in order to move through soul loss--that sensation of stickiness in despair and hopelessness that can grow if we don't move through it--and into the deeper work of reckoning, reclamation, retrieval and remembering. It can be a long journey, seemingly endless as we may find ourselves cycling through older energies that were not grieved fully at the time of their happening. Sometimes, we can carry grief for just a moment, which helps us redirect our presence and intention to a higher frequency of clarity. Often, when we are choosing to meet our grief consciously, we are blessed beyond our personal experience. Our grief has the power to write a new future for our children and creations because we are healing ancestral karma patterns that have swallowed grief and emotion and kept them held within the cells, as well as intergenerational pattern inheritance that showed us how to stifle our pain and instead let it blow wonkily out the side in some form of anger, addiction, abuse, or obsession or distortion of another kind. This lesson today about the awareness that grief brings us to, and the medicine that we find within our grief. The human experience can be a steeping process that sets us further into the medicinal essences we are here to embody and bring forth. Grief is a doorway into the medicine. And our sacred responsibility as we move towards our medicine is to walk through the doorway, and all doorways beyond the initial one. Because our healing requires it. Our legacy requires it. Our future selves require it. A'ho  Show Notes:  Mentorship opportunities for healing through grief are available on my website at www.resonancerestorative.com/mentorship Have an insight or experience about the show that you wish to share with me? I am honored! email me at [email protected]

This week on the show, we are recognizing the true essence of the nature of all things: divinity. That soul residing in an earthbound body that looks out into the world from our human eyes. Are we using our eyes to truly see the divine nature of all beings? Maybe. Only if we are willing to meet and greet our discomfort and say, "I don't know how I am going to move through this, and I am going to do it anyway." To give middle world illustration and anecdote of this, I am offering three very personal narratives of times when I saw the divine in beings that I would've not looked at previously. Yes, it is much easier to recognize divine qualities in people we love and appreciate and see already. Our sacred responsibility as embodied, empowered beings, though, is to love all. To See you soon, truly deeply see through the eyes of the divine and recognize and honor the godself of another. Can we see the god or goddess that we are? Have a returned to that true essence of our medicinal nature? If so, then we must turn our eyes to the beings around us, and acknowledge what is beyond the earthbound circumstance of another embodied soul. We must see past the outer vehicle, and look into the eyes of the divine. If we truly wish to lead a spiritual life, full of our own medicinal essences, and resonating with the higher frequencies of love and healing and embodied truth, we must go beyond. To look where we previously have looked away. To meet what we have thought to be unmeetable, or unworthy to be met. We have to go where we think we will never find spirit. And we must see the full divinity there. In ALL beings. In ALL life. And overlook nothing. We are all teachers for each other, we are all students on a sacred journey. We are all part of the same soul university. And we must recognize this now. More than ever the time is now. See through the eyes of the divine. And watch your life, your relationships, your medicine, transform in transcendental ways. A'ho  Show Notes:  Renee Sills is the co-creator of Embodied Astrology Podcast and project  Carrie Gane is a soul astrology and can be found at Sound Healing Houston 

Continuing on our journey from last week, we are diving further into Ancient Greek myth to understand our own process of individuation and actualization. Referencing the story of Demeter, Persephone and Hades, I retell the myth and uncover its symbology to land the wisdom of the individuation process that actualizes our unique essences for you. Individuation takes place when we, out of rebellion or in answer to our soul's calling, deliberately and intentionally move away from the bonds of our first family and the history we have previously been rooted in in order to create the life we desire. This comes with a choice to move towards initiation (represented by the flower) and will move us towards confronting our demons (Hades) as they rise up into our consciousness. It is then that we move into the Underworld to undertake the process of individuation at a deep psyche level, and when we emerge, we are more of ourselves, standing taller as individuals with unique essences and medicine to offer. I offer the many polarities that we can access from the symbols that, when integrated, bring us into a wholeness that is required to recognize our divinity. If you are on a journey of realization what it is your want for yourself and your life, and are seeking ways to move away from essences that are keeping you from that path, this episode will help you understand the process of individuation in a larger, macro way, as well as the smaller micro lens situations that help push us out of the parameters of our first families and past histories and into the individuated seat of the soul. Be blessed in this journey and know that you are not alone. Love and blessings, Kristi  Explore mentorship containers on offer: www.resonancerestorative.com/mentorship