The Journey That Kicked My Ass

This weekend I had the pleasure of beginning a year long class with my friend Toby Christensen about using shamanic tools for personal healing. GREAT! Toby taught me about the shaman's journey years ago giving me a framework and a language to understand something I had been doing for years in an undisciplined and as it turns out very dangerous way. For me this is THE most powerful tool for personal transformation that I have. It is a place of absolute honesty where you are forced to meet yourself again and again. I love that aspect of it and have grown from every one of the encounters. The shaman's journey has helped me develop a real relationship with "god" (deliberate little g), has plugged me back into writing, has taught me to hold my own power and has brought a beloved friend back for me to interact with. In fact, there are so many folks over there that I no longer doubt that I am loved or powerful. 

So yesterday Toby gave us an exercise - do a journey to meet with your higher self. KICKED MY ASS!!! This is the first time I have ever not been able to do what I intended - well not completely anyway. Because in doing this, you meet yourself as you truly are - beautiful, intelligent, loving and way bigger than we imagine ourselves to be. I was faced with a sudden and overwhelming truth: that my higher self is radiantly beautiful. My ordinary reality self struggles with this to the point of frustration. Last summer while writing for Toby, I got hung up in this same place - understanding and seeing myself as beautiful. In order to finish the journey, I asked to only have to deal with this one aspect - that of beauty. We worked together to help meld those two visions together until I could see that both are equally beautiful. See it, but not integrate it. This has been the sticking point for quite a while. So long, that as I am telling my friend Pat this story later that night, she looks at me and says "Oh, so you learned that you are beautiful". And that was before I had told her any of the details. Am I really THAT transparent??
The solution came today quite unexpectedly in a memory from someone I love: I heard Homer talking about re-defining OK until it encompassed wherever he was on that day. THAT was IT!! The answer to holding that place of seeing myself as beautiful comes from expanding my definition of what constitutes beauty until it holds me too. Easy Peasy. Now I can try that journey again....with better results and as Toby is fond of saying effortlessly and delightfully hold my own beauty.