Rooted & Radiant

May we all feel the welcoming potential of a new year, and of this nourishing New Moon in Capricorn! Happy New Year, and New Moon Love, to you and yours.

To honor this first New Moon of the year, I am excited to share a seed I am planting.

For the next few months, I will be offering two free recorded meditation practices each week. These are guided meditations that I teach in my “Why Stress” classes—stress management classes dedicated to transmuting stress and suffering into self-awareness and Strength. Many students find that the effort they put into their practices is deeply empowering and transformative.

This is the essence of this Capricorn New Moon—putting in the effort needed for individual and collective transformation and empowerment! This effort is grounded in simple practices, consistently applied.

I am incredibly grateful to both witness and experience the ways in which simple practices can create the space for us to experience the presence of magic in our lives. Synchronicity, grace, lifeforce energy become more tangible. Practices that are deeply grounding and embodied can catalyze spiritual and energetic shifts; we begin to perceive the Mystery and magic in all things.

This too is the essence of Capricorn—the recognition that life is both material and magical. The two aren’t separate, and any practice we undertake contributes to the whole. There is no difference between “stress management” and “spiritual” practices—they are two sides of the same coin.

This New Moon week I offer two meditation practices. My intention is that these might create the conditions for contemplation and rest. Also, that they might create a foundation for your own stress management or even personal transformation—a foundation that involves gently expanding your capacity for self-awareness and self-acceptance (and magic!).

Week-by-week, these audios will build a set of practices that may be useful in your own explorations and transformations. I think they’re accessible to a wide range of ages and needs. I know I certainly benefit from creating them, and am excited to share them more widely.

While it is my intention to share these for free, I do have one request. If you try them, please consider the energy of reciprocity. Just as the practical and the spiritual are not separate, nor are giving and receiving. Consider how you might give back out from what you receive. One simple idea: let me know what you think! I always appreciate feedback and questions (and, I also love to create personalized audios). Or share these with someone who might benefit! Thank you.

Here’s the link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/q92t3jnm4q9o9711423xy/h?rlkey=8o61vgdigtlqjl0mrhuwdtg2e&dl=0

May you enjoy and benefit. May our practices together weave a just and peaceful world.

Love,
Gaby

2024 Rooted and Radiant meditations Shared with Dropbox

This past Sunday, the New Moon was in Aries—time of new beginnings, a new astrological cycle—so we find ourselves now in a powerful time for an intention-setting practice!

Setting intentions with the New Moon is like setting seeds into fertile spring soil. There’s an element of preparation, a clarity of intention, and a good dose of trust. The seed we hold in our hand essentially disappears into the Earth. We remain attentive, but we know that whatever’s going on beneath the surface isn’t ours to manage beyond the necessary tending to weeds and water. We trust that what we intended to plant will grow. Roots first, in the darkness, and eventually some tender shoots.

We’re still in the dark phase right now. A good time to ask yourself what you want to grow. Shamanic practitioner Jonathan Hammond teaches a tenet of Hawaiian philosophy known as Makia—the principle that “energy flows where attention goes.” Or, as mindfulness teacher and researcher Shauna Shapiro says, “what you practice grows stronger.”

This present phase of the Moon is a great time to bring your attention to the seeds you are planting—both consciously and unconsciously. Where does your attention habitually go? What are you “practicing” in your life? We’re always practicing something—so this is a powerful time of the month to be sure we’re practicing what we want to grow. This is also a good time to be sure we’re tending to our soils—the conditions that allow these intentions to grow. You can water your intention with a daily journaling practice. You can prepare your inner soils with meditation or any activity that allows you to feel grounded in the present moment.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be taking you on a tour of the phases of the Moon, to give you a taste for my upcoming offering, a 4-week journey through next month’s lunar cycle. May’s “Spring Awakening” is the first adventure on this year’s deep dive into embodying your own most Rooted & Radiant ways of being!

Each week I’ll offer you tips for practice, concepts to explore, and invitations into your own inner wisdom. If you resonate with what I’m offering, please let me know! I’d love to have you join me in May, and I’d love to offer you a free ½-hour mini Shamanic Reiki session to give you a taste for the ways in which I facilitate inner exploration and intentional growth!

Happy Full Moon in Libra this weekend!

One reason why I enjoy tuning into the phases of the Moon is because doing so reminds me of the passage of time, and of the importance of pausing to note and honor that passage. At the Full Moon, we can check in with what’s been happening for us in this cycle—in the two weeks of the Moon’s re-emergence from shadow and into full light. We can ask ourselves what we are bringing out of the shadows and into the light?

With the Moon in Libra—sign of relationship—and the Sun in Aries—all about ME… we have an opportunity to see where our love is (or is not) flowing, and to see into the shadows of what impedes love’s flow.

Last weekend—on the quarter Moon—I was at a retreat (via Zoom, of course) with my meditation teacher, Sally Kempton, and yoga teacher Todd Norian. The theme was love. It was an expansive and magical weekend of practices, synchronicities and insights. During our sessions, I felt myself guided deeply into experiences of the love that infuses everything (in the yoga tradition, we call this Shakti). In between sessions, as I would re-enter my “real life” I could literally feel love spreading to all the unloved parts of myself and overflowing into my relationships. I deeply felt the lubricating effect of that love. Flow was effortless, loving myself, my family, my life felt utterly natural and joyful, and I felt a deep sense of alignment with my place in the world and in this life.

Then came Monday.

While I could still feel the presence of this love, I could also feel all my old stories and habits powerfully reclaiming their place in my body and mind. All the stories of not-enough, too-much, what’s the point, who do you think you are. I see those stories, I know them well, and I know they are neither the truth of who I am nor in service to any of the ideals and visions I wish to bring into the world. And yet. They are strong. Over the next few days, I could feel the tide of that powerful, all-embracing love receding. I felt dry, all my edges brittle again, my nerves too sensitive, my mood, my self-esteem, my libido, my desire for ANYTHING… disintegrating into old patterns.

I’ve ridden Shakti’s waves for long enough to know that contraction inevitably follows any expansion (and vice versa, thank goddess). But that doesn’t make it any less painful. To experience so viscerally how self-created the whole machinery of suffering can be, how a mood can take not only oneself down but also everyone around, and how the cycle of self-blame and hopelessness can ride the tail of that plummeting mood, perpetuating the steep dive—That is suffering. This is what we do to ourselves, these brains, these bodies, these lives! It makes my heart break to see it in others; I’m learning to let my heart be tender when I meet it in myself.

Now it’s Friday, and I am feeling a measure of presence, a capacity to hold the polarities of life WITH the love that sustains it all. A few things helped to pull me out. Paramount, the love of people who really love me. Not for what I do or make but for who I am. May we all feel the presence of those people at our back! And when those people aren’t physically present, may we engage in practices to call them in, to feel the support that is there in the subtler realms. Unquestionably, my meditation practice helped.

Meditation for me is a daily practice of trusting the bigger something that animates me and everything else. It grounds me. It supports a discipline of loving self-inquiry. Meditation cleans the lens of my perception. Then, when all my patterns of unlove clamor for attention, I know there are other truths present, too.

This week I’ve been teaching the Buddhist practice of sympathetic joy. Mudita is the practice of sharing in one another’s joy, in order to expand and spread our own joy. It’s a beautiful practice of recognizing the abundance of joy that is available to us, in any moment. And it’s a painful practice for seeing just how stubbornly our human brain restricts and limits our experience of this joy.

Mid-week, I was totally in that restriction and limitation. I knew it, but I was stuck, with parts of me seemingly addicted to the stuckness, to the yuck. This was the peak of my cranky contraction of unlove. I was thinking about these teachings on Joy and, truthfully, feeling like they were a big pile of BS and no way, no how was I going to practice. So I paused and just asked myself, silently… “who doesn’t want to?” and as that question sank like a stone into my depths, I felt an unmistakable softening in my body. I felt the edges of tears in my eyes, and I felt the relief that comes when we turn towards our own pain. I simply honored the part of me that was fed up—didn’t want to teach, serve, help, love—none of it. Just done. And of course that part was protecting a more tender, wounded part… and the truth was, the unlove I was feeling was protection. It always is, isn’t it? Oh, it’s heartbreaking the ways in which we mount protection by breaking off the very flow of life—connection.

So in that moment, I re-established connection to my complex array of inner attitudes and preferences. That connection was—IS—love. Love is when we reach out across discomfort and connect, instead of retreating in order to protect.

Ah, all of which brings me back to the Full Moon!

May the light of this Moon illuminate and facilitate connection for us all. May life break us free of the limitations of me and mine and into the expansive relationships of US. We ALL deserve life, and love, and safety. We all deserve joy, and we all deserve to feel a tender touch—whether our own or someone else’s—on our wounds.

May you love yourself this Full Moon, and know that by loving yourself, this love overflows into everyone whose life you touch. Love is more powerful than anything else. And, sometimes, we have to choose it, in spite of everything in our wounding that says no.

May we choose love.

Love,
Gaby

PS If you enjoyed this post, please know that I will be teaching this path of love through my offering this year, Rooted & Radiant. The first spiral of this offering will take us through the Ta**us Moon cycle (which includes an Eclipse portal—powerful support for transformation!). It begins on May 11, and I will be posting more here soon, once I figure out some of the tech stuff about how to do so! : )