Category: Poetry

Awakening is…

IshLeave a comment

This morning I want to put into words, what I often refuse to when asked about- what is awakening?

I say, whatever I say will be untrue. So go find out- what is it for you!

but today, the light is just right through the curtains, the words feel so seductive on my tongue, I want to give them shape and space…

La Refuge- home in my soul’s heart.

Awakening is…

being the beingness of being dancing in becoming
wholeness-emptiness-aliveness-
hereness-allness-nothingness

Becoming the eyes and hands of God.
Pure receptivity.
Re-member-ing.
Coming home to.

Even as the dream appears, it dissolves into Truth–
no stickiness here-
seeing becomes seeing
hearing becomes hearing
what is is what is…

being everything and nothing and this thing!
Everywhere and No where and Here. Now.

Simultaneously, timelessly.
Through this physical form, in it, not of it.
This magnificent, sacred vessel. In love of it!

It is transcendence, yes-
transcendence that includes All That Is.

The universal and the particular become the same.
Fully Human. Fully Divine.

Thus I stand.
and I am asked:
Ishi how are you being,
right now?

Grandmother Imaginings

IshLeave a comment

“So listen, I am imagining.

I imagine that I awaken here on Sacred Mother Earth and marvel that I am alive and part of Creation 

I imagine that Creation has given me a body that I  respect and love.

I imagine that I will learn with my physical existence as long as I inhabit my body….  

I imagine that women and men are equal.

I imagine that Life is challenge and giving-otherwise I would not be experiencing the presence of  Life and Her Balance

I imagine that sex is natural (sacred) -and beautiful.

I imagine that all humans are born to Life to Learn and to Grow.

I imagine that I can live my Life and question my own experience and my Existence.

I imagine that I can help change the conditions of my world and my personal circumstances.

I imagine that I can listen to creation directly and that I need no interpreter.

I imagine that I can be my Self even in those times when I am pained by others.

I imagine that I am my own Authority and my own Teacher

I imagine that all information must be questioned by me.

I imagine that I can be the kind Teacher to myself.

I imagine that I am a Self-Responsible human who will teach others to care for our Sacred Mother Earth (with Beauty).”  

–  Estcheemah

Kali, Kali, Maha Kali!

IshLeave a comment

Surrender isn’t easy.

It is humbling- it cracks us open exactly where the light needs to get in. 
It is the last doorway to homecoming, fulfillment.

Especially when we find ourselves in a bardo, as the Tibetans call it- that voidness between what was and what is yet to come.

Here we meet the tug of our cumulated past, our ideas, fears, our attachments, our compulsions. We continue striving for the impossible, perpetuating our own suffering, and that of others. We yield to fear and indulge our pain. We give ourselves up for an imagined reward, and it hurts.

Faced with the real threat of dissolution, and yes, even renewal, it is tempting to collapse, strive, fight, avoid, indulge- employ familiar safety strategies to innocently re-create the false safety that eventually must and will crumble. 

Yesterday’s new moon was a soft punctuation on the completion of a death process for me. After a deep swim in the void, mourning the death of ideas and ideals, humbled and changed, I can feel newness coming alive within me, exacting re-commitment, expanding response ability. 

Renewed, I am eager to welcome a new group of spiritual warriors, awakening and healing through their own cycles of death and renewal, in service of All That Is. 

But only after a full blown teenage rebellion, did I find it- a deeper commitment to the Divine.

Saying yes again to putting both feet into the river of Life. Because, as my friend Joann said, “you can’t find your yes until you allow your no.”  And as Maya Luna says in Becoming Kali (the call of this moment) below, “our pain is the portal to our power.” 

Surrender.

Crying on my knees, I bowed down, offering all the pieces of the Pie of my Life to God – literally, and metaphorically. I am here to do the needful- what is asked of me, and I bring my own wants to the negotiating table. 

Now again, there is peace. And an amused curiosity. I am watching the subtle expansion afoot, I am listening for where and how the pieces fall. 

And I suspect I’m not alone in emerging from a death cycle…creation, existence, dissolution and rebirth are not just markers of life cycles, they accompany us through phases of our evolution, all while still alive. It’s happening now in and around us. So when you examine your life-

What wants to end? What is beginning?

What do you know needs to go, that you don’t want to let go of? 

Can you be with what remains? 
Can you listen to the emergent?

Join us for the FREE September Community Call – RELEASE + REBIRTH on September 20th, 7pm EST to examine these questions together, as we ready to usher in the shifts calling us.
 
REGISTER FOR RELEASE + REBIRTH
As the Equinox tilts us into the Fall, you will be right on time to join the new cohort of MURMURATIONS – a transformational community walking towards truth, love and power, together. The group opens Sept 21, our first gathering will be on Oct 5.

In this unique and rejuvenating process we mine group intelligence, celebrating our light and integrating our shadows to end what needs to end, and welcome in what wants to be made through each and all of us, in a flock of spiritual warriors with shared values. 

There are spaces and scholarships open- all you need to apply is resonance and a commitment to your own transformation.

If you want to know power, and use it aligned with Life itself, explore my invitation, and follow the call.

Self to Self, Power to Power,
Ishita


BECOMING KALI
by Maya Luna

You want to know power?
Stop spitting out your food and eat.
Behold the banquet of density.
Eat the chaos. Be infused by the force that birthed this world into existence
Eat your struggle. Let it brand you with the unbound freedom of fire.
Eat your exhaustion. Let it sand down the jagged edges of your striving.
Eat your losses. Let them open you into the clarity of empty space.
Eat your regrets. Let them infuse you with the blessing of unnameable perfection.
Eat death. Let it scatter into ashes on fertile ground.
Eat your wound. Let it fill you with the marrow of unconditional kindness.
Eat your madness. Let it explode you into the breathless beauty of stars.
Eat your limitations. Let them press you into a radiant diamond.
Eat your hurt. Eat your devastation. Eat your unbearable heartbreak.
Swallow these poisons into the great heart.
Bear down and birth your own deathless body.
Your pain is the portal to power.

Kali Kali Maha Kali – the dark one, she who seeds dissolution of all that is false. 

And then we ask: what remains? 

Naked, you walk

IshLeave a comment

Naked,
you walk 

the edge of a precipice

back where you

began        
again            
to end
begin

they say awakening
is a
360 degree turn

and you
have turned so often

falling down a bottomless pit
 
this state of            
suspended
motion

no beginning no end no forward no behind
no inside no out no up no down 
no where no when

you      are.

isness 
is. 

to live to 95 is a bigger commitment

to being an instrument of Life-
a willing puppet of the Gods

is to be falling 

end. less. ly

into the
[ v o i d ]

to live in God’s flow
full bodied immersion-
in surrender,

is

diving and driving in the dark 
not just once

but again                
and                        
again 

and yet again

all
ways.

I said, the emptier my vessel, the more the Divine can fill it.

the ease of being!

IshLeave a comment
erik-on-the-water-copy
the ease of being

no action 

           rooted
 in      lack

could ever

bring

forth fulfillment for fulfilment

is

here    now     whole ness
               !          (the nature)


of being 

               free and full and delight full !

action
            may
                     (or may not)
arise and 

you 

will know from the 

very 

ease of being

 

in prose:

No action rooted in lack could ever bring forth fulfillment.

Fulfillment is here and now. Wholeness is the nature of being- free, full and delightful! Action may or may not arise- you will know, from the very ease of being.

and more:

To examine inner grasping with curiosity and amusement, rooting into being, is to invite its own dissolution.

Photo above
My husband floating on backwaters in rural Thailand, March 2016 (from STUDIO-ish)