Pronounced Sow-wen {sow as in pig, wen as when}, Oct 31st is the greatest Sabbat in the Wheel of the Year, signaling the end of the light of summer and the descent into the darkness of winter and the underworld. Samhain is the end of the harvest, when the Goddess enters her Crone phase.
Samhain is considered the ‘Magical New Year’ when the pagan calendar resets. Pagan ‘days’ begin in the night and Samhain is celebrated starting the night of October 31st.
This day is considered a liminal ‘time outside of time’ when the veils between the worlds are thin, causing the ancestors, fae, and denizens of the underworld to walk the earth.
The tradition of wearing costumes came from dressing up in a disguise to confuse the spirits and deter them from being able to trick you on the ‘night of mischief’.
Ways to celebrate Samhain :
Make a ancestor altar honoring those who have passed.
Have a silent meal where you set a place and fill a spirit plate for your departed ancestors. After the meal it is customary to offer the plate to someone less fortunate or to leave the plate outside for the fae.
Carve vegetables as Jack o lanterns {the original jack o lantern was a turnip to ward off negative spirits, but turnips are harder to carve then pumpkins}
Go on a nature walk taking in the sensations of the changing season, reflecting on how allowing death sets a fertile stage for new life {contemplate how leaves falling and decaying creates rich soil for the forest}.
Hold a fire ceremony : consider the countless lives of predecessors that made it possible for you to be here now, write a thank you letter to your ancestors for your life and the lessons learned from them.
Write down ancestral / generational patterns you want to let go of and carefully burn them in a fire-safe pot, hearth, or bonfire. You can also light a candle and offer these Reflections while gazing into the flame.
Visit a cemetery and care for the graves.
📹>< This Samhain I am Lilith, first woman, created simultaneously with Adam and his equal, who chose to leave the Garden of Eden rather then be subservient to Adam as he demanded, choosing sovereignty over submission. I have been studying the feral feminine and applying the wisdom to an ecosensual eleusinian ritual and for a book regarding the intuitive feminine spiritual path of the menstrual cycle. I welcome media rex. >< RxR wearing @adey_bell dress invoking before her show
I have been struggling with how to inform people or broach the subject and decided that my discomfort with visibility was not a good excuse to remain in the closet, regardless of the fear I have of judgment, as it can be helpful to have a specific person / example to help anchor abstract concepts such as ‘disability’. Please be gentle with me in this process, it has been a massive reckoning that I am not entirely comfortable with, but I am attempting to lean into what frightens me.
Many have been asking me why I have retracted to my seaside sanctuary for significant solitary spells and have not been social. With greater urgency over the past year or so {but for my whole life as I have a genetic condition} I have been seeking to understand what is going on with my body as I have been experiencing a lot of challenges, including persistent pain. Mostly I have been doing my best to keep from drowning in an interpersonal and physical world that is overwhelming to me as a late diagnosed high masking female bodied autistic, and in this process I have been dragged down underneath all social structures and ended up touching the bottom of the ocean of my subconscious. With this post I am now surfacing and bringing the pearls of wisdom from the depths.
It has taken over a year of advocacy in the face of medical gaslighting to get diagnosed with Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome {hEDS}, POTS, and Dysautonomia {still in the process of exploring an MCAS diagnosis}. hEDS is a genetic condition that causes abnormal collagen synthesis. Dysautonomia is abnormality in the functioning of the autonomic nervous system {all of the subconscious parts of nervous system functioning}, of which you could say POTS is a specific flavor.
Allopathic medicine says there are no cures, there is only treatment management. These conditions, which are frequently co morbid, are often misdiagnosed or under diagnosed. The amount of personal research and survival advocacy I have had to do to request the tests, appointments, referrals, faxing medical records, etc. to diagnose these conditions has been existentially exhausting. I wish I could receive the care that I give.
Interestingly much of what is recommended for symptom management I have already been doing for a very long time / are considered ‘quirks’ of my personality : low FODMAP diet, low impact exercise / cusioned ground due to hypermobility, inventing my bodywork style {mutual pandulation that co regulates the nervous systems of all participating}, traveling around with an aerial rig to decompress my spine + joints, wearing gloves {to protect my super soft, stretchy, and slow healing skin}, and even living at sea level. My dysautonomia has made me an expert in how to regulate the nervous system out of a hypersensitive survival necessity.
Living with an ‘incurable’ invisible illness creates a massive container of compassion born of challenge. I am a corporeal canary in the coal mine who needs to create somatic sanctuaries wherever I go so that I can exist in a space without pain or days of recovery.
I believe this is also why I am so perceptive and permeable to the collective subconscious : because i have needed to feel beyond the boundary of my own autonomic processes to be able to monitor and regulate my nervous system to continue to exist in physical form with the boss level body and epigenetic trauma history I have been given.
Beyond research into my condition, I have been spending much of my time in movement meditation at my ocean monastery, studying feral feminine threads of knowledge, and creating custom rituals for rapturously reconnecting us with a regulated state in the body and from there expanding our edges to include the whole ecosensual ecosystem. I am very grateful to have the framework of Earth Body, a federally recognized church I co-founded to guide my understanding of my purpose and provide some social scaffolding that others can grasp conceptually as I live an unusual life as a somatic creature creating new cultures {donations gratefully received to continue expanding and sharing this work}. My body is the earth and we are in pain.
I am seeking to spend my rare / kariotic shifting capacity life force energy in ongoing ceremonial offering to your ability to be present as this aids in ascribing value to the pain I am currently constantly experiencing. I can offer the intensity of my enduring physical form as an ordeal path to oneness. This helps me make meaning to frame my persistence in remaining in physical form as a prayer of permission for you to find your pluripotent pleasure while we are on this plane. May we find presence in physicality, we will be disembodied soon enough.
‘work’ wise I am requesting support with sharing my skills with those you sense could benefit. I am a world shifting healer and relational artist at the evolving embodied edge, my strength is not marketing.
I am grateful for you to refer beings that could be served by the wisdom I have cultivated in the healing realms of bodywork and somatic therapy, and with this nascent label, as an advisor to make more disability accommodating spaces, which creates sensory and Somatic Sanctuaries for all people, even those that are able bodied. If you live long enough, you will also become disabled {I’m just an early adopter /lh {this /lh means ‘said in a lighthearted tone’ and is a tone tag, they help autistics like me understand the intent} }. I also am skilled at being : a muse, creative doula, book / writing editor, Theraputographer / video + audio documentor, and +more+ on my web portal Raz.ma
I welcome invitations to your healing spaces such as hot springs and other nature + body based temples, and to advise on birthing new nourishing healing places. I welcome your advocacy of my inclusion in spaces and at events that would be served by the healing grounded wisdom I am privileged to embody and share as a disabled person. I seek kindreds to ideate and bodystorm on these threads of creating a world that honors diverse threads of knowledge over fawning to preexisting power dynamics. I am the truth telling healer jester.
More acutely, I am currently waking up in the middle of the night with physical pain. I am seeking references for physical therapists experienced with hEDS, as all the appointments are booked out months in advance. I also need to do low impact movement, the best of which, due to the pressure being regulating, is swimming. If you know of salt water pools {chlorine makes my skin react} I would be deeply grateful to be given access especially while I build up joint-supportive muscle strength. I have been informed that my level of care has burned out my small circle of support that I admittedly have been leaning on, and I am feeling like a burden, so if you feel like you have capacity I welcome words of affirmation to help me rebalance into compassion and hope and reminding me of the good I bring into this world in my existence. My dream is to live in a temple where I can heal everyone that comes and my basic needs are taken care of. I am ready to live with beloveds again after living on my own for the first time in my life.
Thank you for your consideration in helping co-create compassionate corporeal culture.
Dark feminine oracle Adey Bell is performing musical magic in Fairfax at the community church on SFD today at 8 pm. Do your golden shadow a favor and find yourself there.
Adey’s performances are unique as public social contexts in which you are welcome to embody unconscious parts of the self. Adey volunteers her soul craft as a vulnerable first volunteer and seasoned performer, setting a sonic stage for our shadows to be inspirationally illuminated by a multigenerational musical muse.
Adey sets a sumptuous sonic table for you to invite your exiled parts to be seen and generously served soulful numinous nourishment. The parts of you that you typically hide away have a place as honored guests at her modern theatrical temple. These prayerformances are empathetic experiments in trying on new characters to excercize + exorcize your psyche : gathering dispersed, dispelled, divorced, or distracted-from parts of yourself home to wholeness. In Adey Bell’s resonance, your freakquency flexes your resplendant range, access to the wisdom of fluid facets of your form restored.
When we have the mirror of art to provide a mobile plane for reflection we are able to see our psychological textures. Shapes without shadow are simply 2D planes without dimensional depth.
Tonight, celebrate the turning of the season and let the wall of your mask fall into a bridge to connection though a luscious musical medicine journey guided by Adey Bell.
Tonight I am surrendering to seduction, serenaded by sonic siren Adey as she gathers the witches, weirdos, healers, & deep feelers around the creative cauldron in chorus, where all of us are welcome.
For those unable to be present in person, give this channel’s work a listen to prepare for the upcoming lunar eclipse Monday. A sampling of my favorite songs are Great Mother, Devastavious, Intimate, and Remind.Her.
You get one more chance to catch Adey in the bay {she resides in North Carolina} tomorrow in Petaluma at a private venue.
Pic by @adey of RxR in Oracle88 upcycled merch {available at the show}.
Celebrated as the first harvest August 1-2, Lughnasadh {pronounced LOO-na-sah} is halfway between the summer solstice {Litha} and the fall equinox {Mabon} and is a time to give gratitude for the first fruits of the earth, and traditionally, grains. Lughnasadh is named after the Celtic god Lugh who also held the title ‘Artful Hands’ and was known as a warrior, poet, sorcerer, crafter, and blacksmith.
Lugh was known as the ‘many skilled’, a master of many talents. As the god of oaths, he held domain over rulers and nobility, enacting justice.
How to celebrate :
Give gratitude for abundance : start a daily ritual writing down what you are thankful for on slips of paper, placing them in a jar or bowl, and in adding to this collection, watching that when you reflect on gratitude, your ability to see blessings multiplies! Honoring Lugh, contemplate the fruits of your labor, appreciating your hard work, favorite qualities, talents, and reflecting on what you’ve accomplished.
Show off your skills :
Celebrate the ‘many skilled’ Lugh by hosting a games night. You can hold board, tabletop, or classic games such as chess as well as more modern variants such as charades or bean bags. Athletic outdoor games can include races, tag, and other team sports or friendly sporting competitions {you can create unique silly contests as well!}.
Talent show :
Share what has come to fruition : bring and present your crafts, art, writings, instrument playing, baked goods. Host a fashion show and model your flower crowns.
Collect + reflect on seeds :
Collect seeds for next planting season. Make a corn husk, grass, or plant doll, and next year when planting the next season’s garden bury it as a symbolic offering to the Earth, returning what the Earth has provided back to the Earth. Reflect on how to nourish that which nourishes you, that to let something go means to plant the seeds of new beginnings, and meditate on the cycles of nature, life, and decomposition.
Honorable Harvest :
Robin Wall Kimmerer shares how to harvest in right relation : Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Take only what you need and leave some for others. Use everything that you take. Take only that which is given to you. Share it, as the Earth has shared with you. Be grateful. Reciprocate the gift. Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.
Decorate your altar with :
Symbols of the harvest such as : Cornucopia, wicker baskets, sheaves of grain, corn husks, sunflowers, scythe, garden shears, the Tarot cards the Sun and Strength, and symbols of your skills / talents.
Colors : tones of a field ready for harvest such as yellow, gold, bronze, brown and green.
Are you seeking reparative attachment experiences? Were you adultified and never got to be cared for aš a child?
If so, your inner child/teenage parts are probably grabbing the steering wheel of your life in order to get their needs met or protect you from a projection of past harm transposed into the present.
I would like to support you in applying my hypersensitive autistic pattern recognition to bring clarity to your inner landscape.
This week I was the guardian angel to a journeyer with the intention of receiving a reparative nourishing mother experience of feeling safe and joyful.
I combined my knowledge of transpersonal somatic therapy with bodywork and for 12 hours alternated between utilizing my studied intellect to identify patterns in their constellations of relating, while concurrently employing my embodied empathy in excavating deep tissue release of stored trauma, and also smoothing out the waves of catharsis through weaving in more integrative soothing light touches of petting / combing / scalp massaging the head.
I call this somatic window of tolerance work, where we pendulate between naming, releasing, and reassigning long standing bound up patterns with the soothing gentleness of head caresses, a body-wide tidal breathing that integrates intensity.
This high touch work provides a reference point for feeling safe in the body, a Somatic anchor. This physical pattern of feeling loved can then be a touchstone compass that creates the capacity for you to know when you are moving towards or away from this healthy Nourishment. Thus, we create your unique map, orienting towards accurate calibration with your body as an instrument of the subconscious, speaking it’s native tactile tongue.
Emancipatory embodiment can completely transform entrenched patterns, and I am honored to work with you at the evolving edge of therapeutic touch. Please reach out for support or send beloveds who would be helped by an ally this way.
Accessing subconscious wisdom : Dark Feminine Freedom
Emerging from my birthday chrysalis and honoring this full moon, a steady through line is highlighted – applying the depth of my capacity to delve into the subconscious and bridge these mercurial learnings back to the conscious mind.
In work as the founder of Earth Body Temple, I have been observing that the archetype of the dark feminine iš cresting in the collective consciousness. Briefly, the dark feminine is associated with the : subconscious, wild, undomesticated, instinctual, passionate, fearless, liberatory, transformative, fertile void as well as Eros, righteous rage, dissolution, and decomposition.
I describe my autism as a raw exposed nervous system that results in a mind boggling depth of detail in my sensory perception that is exponentially higher resolution than average. This often overwhelming sensitivity is a gift and a challenge and leads to an unusually intense life.
I am unable to turn these perceptions off, and when I attempt to censor the findings I become a dysregulated canary out of alignment with my justice sensitivity, which gets tricky when the insights are related to interpersonal behavior, hierarchical systems, or the culture at large.
While learning how to work with this ‘naked emperor’ honesty, I have run into challenges when others are not prepared to receive these vulnerable, revelatory, and life-altering insights. I am learning that I have to discover ways to provide informed consent to those around me about my tendency towards truthful transparency. I am attempting to define this role as a healer-jester or a motivational Movement Muse. I welcome novel frames on how to explain these proclivities.
Thankfully, the unique gift of these traits can come through to you in providing a deep perspective tracking how your subconscious communicates through your body and through my acting as an ally in bringing these stirrings to your conscious awareness. This elucidation helps you redirect patterns of behavior and happenstance nervous system regulation techniques into directions that are more supportive to your wellness. I apply this somatic therapy informed attunement to provide nuanced perspective in how your subconscious translates through your soma so that you can experience greater thriving through a deepend connection to yourself, others, and the Transpersonal.
If you are experiencing confusion, wishing to expand your access to your own embodied wisdom, or seeking subconscious support, please reply.
On this full moon in capricorn, additional methods to connect to the dark feminine include :
~ Reorienting away from chronos – linear clock time, and towards kairos – sacred, cyclically aligned timing.
~ Practicing utilizing your intuition in low stakes scenarios.
~Deepening into a lucid dreaming practice {on the suggestion of a congregant I have begun meditating in my lucid dreams and this not only stabilizes dreaming, but also results in Siddhis such as levitation}
~Perceiving life from inside of your body, especially through your generative organs.
~Honoring the night and spending time in the darkness.
As a birthday gift to help me illuminate my path : what unique traits / skills / experiences have we shared that point to my purpose? If we all suddenly received UBI and you could give me a completely new job that has never before existed based on my passions, what would it be?
There are two objective physical indicators for nervous system dysregulation : 1. Looking at the back of your throat, on either side of your uvula where your tonsils are, if one side is higher than the other, you are dysregulated. 2. If the trapezius muscles {triangle from base of spine, point of shoulder and midway down the back} are at two different tightnesses.
How to regulate and restore balance :
A. At the base of the skull is the emergence point of many cranial nerves. Laying on your back and providing gentle pressure and movement to the point where the spine enters the brain case can help floss nerves and create space.
B. Keeping your head still and looking to a hard right until you discharge via a yawn, sigh, or swallow. Repeating looking to the left. This variation can also be done while moving the head.
From ‘Healing power of the Vagus Nerve’
How do you know you are dysregulated?
How do you regulate your nervous system?
If you want to become an expert at reading the signals of your body and creating healthy prosocial ways to regulate yourself so you can allow your body to enter into a self healing state and access creativity and flow, reach out.
Currently working on a comprehensive list of easeful techniques to regulate your nervous system I will release in my museletter, share / dm your email if you’d like to be added.
If I could only teach one meta skill to every humanimal it would be attunement.
In giving bodywork I am attuning to the impact of my touch on the receiver. When you are using significant weight, this becomes even more crucial. Only move at the speed and depth of being able to sense your impact on the other person{s}. Start low, go slow. In bodywork someone’s attunement level is not falsifiable, unlike potentially empty words.
As an AFAB autistic raised in an intergenerational war refugee trauma / emotional abuse context I was trained to turn my hyper sensitivity to tracking the wellbeing of those around me to survive as a helpless child dependant on my caregivers. As I process from the bottom up, I am taking in an enormous set of data and forming a perspective {40 per cent more sensory stimuli then allistics at minimum, and much likely more}. This makes me unparalleled for not putting you in a box preemptively, which is much more labor and recovery for me, but results in a high definition experience of being felt and seen for you. Feeling feeling felt for the first time in your life seperate from typical knee jerk assumptions/ judgments is an experience that most have when working with me. This externally enforced sensing can cause a paradigm shift in your perspective of yourself and your ability to pursue a new pattern seperate from what has been entrenched in your experience, as there is now another being who holds the new viewpoint and is seeking data to support this.
When you share what you are working towards and how you want to be perceived I will shift my comprehensive data collection drive to finding moments where this new frame is true, and opportunities to choose a new fork in your thought or action even when the pre existing pattern is dominant. The transformation occurs in the pause, assisted by a compassionate witness who holds the vision of your preferred path.
Do you want to feel your body played like a professional instrument?
Do you long to be holistically taken care of, body, mind, and spirit, by an attuned nourishing presence that holds your wellness as their motivating force?
Then body domming is your dream come true.
What is a body dom?
A body dom specializes in the art of professionally conducting the orchestra of sensation in your body as their beloved instrument. Body domming draws from diverse disciplines : massage, contact improvisation, body handling, corporeal consent, somatic therapy, sensual wrestling, surgical bodywork, psychedelic / trance state navigation, and sensation play. Body domming creates a generous, compassionate contact container of high access to an exquisitely attuned embodiment expert’s physicality. Within this corporeal container, an expansive playtonic permissionary perspective encourages you to fully inhabit your intuition through emancipating expression without reservation – catalyzing a co-creative space of fluid, free improvisation.
Body domming is a revelatory rapturous release if you spend most of your time trapped in your head, intellect, future, or past, for this perceptive penetration is forced presence via pressure—a movement meditation squeezing out all other stimuli to focus on the present moment at the point of contact – giving weight and waiting for you, the receiver, to relax. The immediacy-inspiring intensity of sensation is a forcing function for increasing interoception, dilating internal sensations that were previously able to be numbed or ignored, and surfacing subconscious communications to be sorted by sentient awareness through compassionate cathARTic witnessing and freedom forward facilitation.
Lest you consider this punative, body domming also can feel like you are being lovingly mothered. Through transpersonal tactile transmutations, you receive reparative experiences of rebirth, being held in a welcoming womb, cradled, feeling cared for and nourished as an adored baby. This radical reference allows you to repattern your attachment system towards uncomplicated caregiving, encouraging courage in expressing your needs and desires, and recalibration towards how ecstatically expansive you can feel in your body, empowering new prosocial perspectives for overall orientation.
This modality is also flexible enough to encompass experiences of pushing against, away, and being felt in embodied strength, anger, and other disowned emotions, sheparding you into somatic sovereignty. Through high-resolution attunement, your nervous system can finally feel the trust necessary to discharge frozen survival responses and liberate that energy that had been previously padlocked into patrolling triggers and traumas toward a greater depth of immersion in and authentic response to life as it presents in the moment.
If your nervous system is chronically in a fight / flight / freeze / fawn state, proximity to peace via a nearby regulated nervous system through touch and breath are the only reliable ways to communicate safety to pre-verbal parts. Through body domming you can bypass the wordy quagmire of social misinterpretation with a direct line to the humanimal nervous system – finally entering into a restorative parasympathetic state – the rest and digest, tend and befriend, and mate and relate mode that is the foundation for creativity, flow, and connection to self and other. If you are working on a convoluted issue that you are unable to solve through top-down processing, entering into this bottom-up sensate state allows access to the full wisdom and data processing capabilities of your subconscious as it speaks through the body, and can result in revelations around the solution you are seeking through feeling and freeing the foundations of your form.
This practice is expanding and could include you! If you are curious for more detailed left brain logistix or are ready to apply please email x @ Raz. Ma
Integration is the incarnate implementation of an intention.
Sharing the harvest from my work aiding people with life-changing Integrations, the following frames build upon psychological research into rewards and motivation.
These ‘power ups’ help you bridge the gap between intention and implementation – helping you stick with your habit changes. . . How are your daily habits leading you towards the life you dream of? . .
Change your identity :
Psych research demonstrates that the most sustained changes in habit stem directly from a change in your identity / narrative.
For example ~ I am a healthy person who prioritizes physical wellness.
Instead of ~ ‘I can’t eat junk food’ or ‘I need to get in shape’.
This identity change creates congruences across a variety of choices, such as whether to go for a walk, whether to engage in binge eating, and what to get at the grocery store.
. . Don’t > Can’t :
‘Don’t’ points to a change in identity and leans on character congruency, ‘can’t’ requires more novel willpower, which you can quickly exhaust, as you only have a certain amount per day. . .
Small wins fuel the engine of change :
Break down big goals into small pieces and projects. Create a calendar where you have a visual acknowledgment of success in adding one more link to the ‘chain’ – this creates a lot of inertia to not want to break the ‘streak’.
These little wins keep giving a much-needed motivational dopamine reward boost to keep you going, and don’t end up taking much from the large overall ‘pile’ of dopamine you will receive when you accomplish your big goal.
These little wins keep giving a much-needed motivational dopamine reward boost to keep you going, and don’t end up taking much from the large overall ‘pile’ of dopamine you will receive when you accomplish your big goal.
. .
Tip jar for good behavior:
Putting a small amount of money into an account when you engage in a healthy habit, such as preparing a good meal, that you can then put towards a related support splurge, like going out to a nice healthy restaurant, helps create a sustaining dopamine reward trickle.
. .
Take small bites :
Try to make a 1% improvement daily – something manageable, but when in aggregate will add up to a lot.
. .
Consistency :
If you slip up one day on a habit {such as exercise}, forgive yourself, but ensure you will engage the pattern the next day, so that missing your chosen habit does not become the new pattern! Aka, one day is ok, but double your effort to return to the desired habit the next day. . . Create an easy on-ramp :
If you engage in the behavior you are attempting to move away from, such as having an unhealthy snack, see it as an isolated incident rather than a reason to give up completely. Consider that you may have set your challenge bar too high and see how you can create more intermediate steps to make the change closer to a smooth ramp and less like lunging up a huge step or climbing a steep ladder. . . Increase intertia : Friction breaks Addiction.
Make the habits you want to increase easier and those that you want to discourage harder. Create space from satisfying your impulses immediately – even if only momentary – like needing to click through a separate folder to access your social media apps, not saving your passwords, or taking the batteries out of the remote and having a book close at hand when you sit down in your ‘relaxing’ spot. . . Pleasurable Physical Triggers / Reminders
Create common pleasurable physical triggers you will come across to encourage your desired behavior. For example, if you would like to drink more water, acquire a vessel you love to touch that is pleasing to you and always have this vessel with you. Tie drinking water with a color such as blue {eg. getting a vessel that is blue} and place blue cups and imagery of water in prominent places, set a timer to go off every hour with a waterfall sound – to encourage you to get out of your chair, stretch and have some water, etc. If there is a negative stimulus affecting your water consumption, such as not enjoying the taste of tap water, gather spring water, or get mineral drops or a healthy electrolyte solution to add to your water. . . Accountabilibuddy :
Someone you check in with that you are externally accountable to often makes the biggest difference, as you are motivated to not disappoint them. . . Reach out if you’d like to explore me being an accountabilibuddy or want help creating supportive structures for change in your life.
