Light Lessons with Borage

March 02, 2021 2 Comments

I began this moon cycle being reminded that in September 2019 I offered my very first Plant Spirit Moonwise Mentorship circle in my Soulflower Sanctuary journeying with Borage (OPTIMISM).

It was the first time I really shared with others my personal deep dive process, working with one guiding plant spirit for an entire moon cycle, and I remember feeling excited, full of hope and extremely vulnerable all at the same time. 

And so this moon cycle, in the special way that the plant spirits always show up, I’ve been working with Borage again for my first shared journey in the new garden I’m cultivating, the Soulflower CommUNITY Garden.

I began by revisiting the old blog post, Is the Proverbial Cup Half Full or Half Empty? to help me remember that journey. What struck me most was the relevance to how I was feeling now, like I was still in that same cycle and nothing has really changed...except, of course, that everything has changed.  

Our world has been turned upside down, and inside out, and more than ever we are witnessing and feeling trauma upon trauma that has been energetically held in our bodies, and in the Earth’s body, for generations coming up to be seen so that we can heal. So that humanity can heal. 

It is so hard when faced with so much pain to not believe the world is literally falling apart. BUT, having been on the healing path for a while now, having experienced my own breakdowns (multiple times), what I believe we are witnessing is our collective “dark night of the soul”—the painful, cracking open and shattering of old stories so that we can let go of outdated, restrictive ways of being and allow new growth and new life to evolve. 

The only certainty in life is change and this remembering is heartwork on a global scale. No one, NO ONE, will be left untouched by this process.

Tuning in I immediately felt Borage inviting me to “take a stand.” Not in the sense of “taking a side” which is the battle message we are being bombarded with on mainstream media, but instead a stand from a place rooted in what I wish to see, feel and create in this world. One that embraces my hopes rather than preys on my fears. One that resides in my deep, inner knowing that the world I love is a beautiful, light-filled, hope-filled place of incredible diversity, creativity and interconnection. 

I know that if we continue to spend all day enmeshed in the belief that the world is a scary place, if we reside in the darkness where the world has gone to hell, if we let go of hope, then that will be our experience and we are only adding fuel to the fire.

Borage is light-filled medicine for the heart. She speaks to me, fills me, with the specific kind of courage you need to find when you feel overwhelmed and weighed down with despair and feeling like the future is bleak—OPTIMISM. 

Not glittery, shiny optimism that allows us to bypass and avoid the dark, but deep trust optimism, that allows us to plant and nurture powerful seeds of hope in our hearts so that we can feel AND move through the challenging times when we are in them. 

The kind of optimism that allows us to grow a new story from a place of love and understanding and compassion for ourselves and the human condition. 

Borage asked me, “Do you TRUST life?”

“Of course!” I thought. This journey has always, always been about trust. 

And yet, as the moon waxed I kept feeling waves of grief and sadness and pain as I encountered all the ways that my thoughts, words and actions belie the trust that my heart wants to open to. And to top it off my head was hurting…a lot. 

I tried to blame the heaviness and pain I was feeling on my poor timing giving up coffee, or maybe it was just the bitter winter weather we were experiencing or the never-ending pandemic or something else I couldn’t explain, but everywhere I looked (including within), I uncovered struggle and stories rooted in the belief that life is simply a series of disappointments, disasters and dramas to be controlled and avoided at all cost.

“Oh Borage, you beautiful bringer of light, help me shift this density, this darkness.”

In my imagination I shrunk myself down to receive a shower of light from Borage’s downward facing flowers, each one radiating a beautiful light from their centers. I let the light gently wash over me.

Borage asked me to broaden my understanding about what light is. 

Light is information, light is understanding, awareness, forgiveness, inspiration and so much more. Light is energy, life force, LOVE, unconditional love...Hmmm.

When I am out in Nature, watching the sun rise, tending to my garden, I feel this energy clearly and I allow it to flow through me, to hold me, to heal me. It opens my heart and I can allow the love that I feel, that I am, to flow through me. It is Divine. 

Of course, I then began thinking about all the ways we fear light, hide from it, slather on sunscreen even to block it! 

Opening to light, to love, to receive does not come easily when we have spent a lifetime building layers upon layers of safety measures to protect ourselves from all that is fearful. To protect ourselves from life.

Hmmm. Maybe my head hurts because my thoughts are broken? 

Or maybe my thoughts are simply growing in conditions that do not support them? Maybe my connection to source, to light, to my higher self is blocked or compromised in some way? 

A-ha! Every cell in my body resonated with this understanding.

My thoughts aren’t broken, they are just disconnected and coming from a place of pain, a place of separation—separation from Source, from Nature, from the truth of who I am.

We are eternal beings of light having a human experience. Nature, the flowers show me this over and over and over...and yet...it's hard to break old patterns of victimhood and blame, to not think I must be doing something wrong when I keep finding myself in pain, emotionally and physically. 

It took every ounce of energy I had to just be a loving witness to my own experience and to try not to attach a narrative, a story, a judgment to the painful emotions that were having their way with me. To not numb my feelings with comfort food or screens, or when I did, not think any less of myself for doing so.  

Just feel. Just be PRESENT. Just be. Over and over. 

The prisons we create for ourselves are real. So is the unconditional love that Nature is always showering us with. 

I deeply trust the intelligence and wisdom of Nature. 

I deeply trust that my heart knows how to navigate my life from a place of joy, conscious connection and love, and that my body knows what’s up when it suggests I forego my morning cup of joe 😜...and yet...I also know that this is only possible when I can get my head, my human judgment and my ego out of the way. 

When I trust life.

And this is the work isn’t it? Trusting that what our hearts share with us, what our intuition and inner knowing reveals, our truth...IS THE TRUTH and not overriding it, squashing it, ignoring it, because another’s truth which differs from our own, or an older version of our truth takes precedence.

We are conditioned from very early on to not trust life or the realm of our hearts—our feelings and emotions—or our bodies wisdom, and that the only safe or viable path forward is the one guided by our rational, logical, controlling mind and the myriad external experts telling us what to do.

And do we ever struggle with change! 

Rewiring old patterns is no easy task! But I know this is what I am here to do and I also know Borage was showing up to lovingly light the way. That’s just the way the plants, and all of life really, works. 

We live in a world where everything is energy vibrating.

We are energetic beings experiencing the energy of emotions and feelings vibrating in our physical bodies. And life naturally matches our vibration so that we can feel and then see it reflected back at us in our everyday experiences—like a nonjudgmental built-in feedback loop for our own personal growth and evolution. 

Except that we really like to judge and attach labels of good or bad to everything. Right?! We prefer to live in our heads.

All of life is always conspiring to help us grow, yet our old routines and habitual patterns of behavior keep us literally stuck in old versions of ourselves—in old paradigms.

And our bodies, our hearts, are so wise!

I didn’t know it then, but changing up my morning coffee routine was exactly the medicine I needed to help me create a new pattern in my life. To help me rewire! 

It seems like such a small thing, but over the next week I noticed how I was doing my morning differently. Life brought me experiences, conversations, and spontaneous flashes of understanding (light) that helped me to see where I was stuck, physically and emotionally. 

I even had a perfectly timed appointment with a physical therapist that I had spontaneously set up a couple weeks prior—you know an intuitive, inspiring nudge—where she supported me in literally retraining my muscles to hold myself differently—to take a new stand!

I can feel my body softening, surrendering, remembering the wisdom that Borage is bringing to light within me. 

“How can you do things differently?” Borage inquired. 

She is such a gentle bringer of light, of hope. 

How can we rewire the deeply held belief that life is just a scary series of disasters, dramas and deadly diseases that we need to constantly battle, control, fix, and eradicate to survive? 

We are so profoundly distracted with our battle against life that we can’t see what we are creating, vibrating out into the world for it to reflect back at us. We have literally created a pandemic and a fear-based control narrative that has us isolated and waging war on each other.

Life is showing us that our deeply held belief that we are somehow separate from Nature, from ourselves, from each other, is our collective core wound—one that we have ALL carried for generations and generations and the unhealed place that we persist in creating from. 

And I can also see our beautiful, wise and tender hearts cracking open, over and over, trying to get our attention, trying to get us to listen. Trying to help us to remember that we belong to each other. 

This is our true Nature. 

“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.”—Hafiz (and Borage 🌸)

“Yes,” smiles Borage.

And I can feel her soft light filling me up, flooding my weary heart with fresh courage, confidence, hope and faith in our ability to not only move through these challenging times but to grow a new story from a place of connection, understanding and compassion for the human condition.

Healing the separation wound is going to take time and lots and lots of nonjudgmental presence and love. 

We are going to have to choose to do things differently—to see the cup not as half full or half empty, but connected to an infinite source and refillable!

We are going to have to remember how to trust life.

 

Dig deeper with Borage (OPTIMISM) here.

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