On my way back from Arizona, I spent the night in Victorville, CA. This is where I had been an exchange student in 1994. It's where I fell in love for the first time and lost my virginity.
A lot of emotions came up when I drove by familiar places - the high school, the house where I lived, the apartment complex where my love lived. And it occurred to me how easy the universe had made it for Brent and I to become really close really fast: We lived in walking distance from each other; all I had to do was walk across a golf course to get to his house.
The class ended on Saturday around noon. After five and a half days of being in a circle of amazing women surrounded by love and safety, we had to part ways. I felt very lost, alone and scared that afternoon.
Sunday was my last full day in Sedona. I was free to do whatever I pleased. When I woke up in the morning, I felt like shit. I dragged myself to a coffee shop and finished reading Joya's book, Ave Maria. And the very last paragraph provided a clue for me. Her mother had just died:
I hung up the phone and laid in my mother's bed, trying to reconnect with her energy body. Trying to talk myself out of letting my emotions lower my vibration. I knew that going into my lower chakras would just take me farther away from the spiritual bliss that was now my mother. I told myself that the only way to connect with her was by raising my vibration, not lowering it. But nothing was working. Even after all of the spiritual experiences, the true knowing that there is no death, and the belief and faith that my mother was united with our Divine Mother, the truth was, I would still miss her physical presence here on Earth. I had to experience the grief of her loss. So, being in a body and being human, I did the only thing humanly possible that I could do to ease the deep aching that I felt in my heart. I cried and cried, until I eventually cried myself to sleep.
I closed the book and started walking home and started crying. I realized that I had been experiencing something similar all week. Every night I had been losing sleep because I had been worried about what Kean was doing, and I had tried to raise my vibration and surround myself with unconditional love, and it hadn't worked. I told myself that I should be able to do this, damnit, because I was above those petty human feelings of jealousy and anxiety, that I was surrounded by love and divine energy and able to be okay. But I was not okay, and I had to acknowledge that. I had to accept my human feelings and that they might never fully go away.
I think that I had secretly hoped that this trip was going to help me be unconditional love all the time, and that I was going to return home free from jealousy and that I was going to be okay about whatever Kean was doing, and that I was not going to care. But I do care. A lot. And I have to honor that.
I have to honor my feelings and my boundaries. Up until now I hadn't wanted to set any boundaries because I didn't want to think that I had (or needed) any. I wanted there to be absolute freedom. After accepting my humanness, I was finally able to accept that I had boundaries. I saw clearly that in order for this relationship to be happy and healthy for both of us, I need Kean to respect my boundaries. I am still not going to tell him NO or STOP because I do not want to restrict his freedom. But I am going to be very clear about what is and what isn't within my comfort zone, and I am going to ask Kean to take that into account and respect it when making his decisions.
I understand now that this week has been so hard because I wasn't able to trust Kean to respect my boundaries because there weren't any. In the quest for unonditional love, I have found my humanness and my boundaries. I still believe that uncondional love is somewhere down the road but I first had to bring unconditional love to the ugliness of my humanity with all its fears and insecurities. I feel like I achieved that today by acknowledging my boundaries.
On Friday afternoon I had the most beautiful past life vision yet. I was working with the German girl, and both of us had very peaceful and positive visions.
I saw myself as a prehistoric male. I was naked and very, very hairy. The women in my tribe were hairy as well. We were vegetarians because we didn't like to kill things. My parents in that lifetime were my current parents. They taught me at an early age how to hypnotize wild animals in order to make friends with them and turn them into vegetarians as well. I was very proud of my parents for this. They passed this gift onto me, and by the time I was an adult, all the wild animals in the area had been "converted", and we were living peacefully with each other. We were able to cuddle with wolves and dance with bears.
At some point another tribe came into our area. They were very afraid because they had had some scary experiences with wild animals. The bravest of them came to talk to me. He didn't trust me at first, but when he saw that I had no fear of anything, he started trusting me. I told him about the area and that we were living peacefully with all the animals. I was able to sense the fear from the rest of his tribe, and it worried me. But when he brought me to them, they all looked at me with big eyes, and my fearlessness gave them hope. They believed me and started trusting me. The tribe ended up settling near us, and we became peaceful neighbors.
When I died, my tribe watched me die. I was floating in a river with a circle of leaves around me that my friends had made. My last thought was "Life is good." I hadn't known any suffering in this life time. After passing over, I realized that there is suffering elsewhere on the planet and I vowed to take the essence of this peaceful life into the future with me and spread it.
The day we were partnered up, the girl I rolled around on the floor with regressed to be a Chicago cop during the time of the Prohibition. Her accent and mannerisms changed during the regression, she remembered names with such detail, and her emotions were so strong that I felt like I was watching a movie, and I was in complete awe and suspense. The cop's name was Frank, and I was very fond of his character.
The next morning I wrote on her arm "I (heart) Frank." She then wrote on her other arm "I (heart) Vera." Shortly after that she turned to me and said "You were the girl!" There had been a girl in Frank's life, a beautiful girl, whose heart he had broken because she had wanted to get married but he couldn't leave his sick mother's home. My classmate said that the first time she saw me in the beginning of the week, she had thought "There is the beautiful blond girl" even though I wasn't blond. For the rest of the week, she and I sat next to each other and cuddled a lot, and I really liked being close to her. Like I said, I heart Frank.
Later that day, I talked to Kean on the phone and found out about his sexual activities while I was gone, and there had been some, and I didn't sleep well AT ALL that night. The next morning I knew that I had to bring this up with the group during check-in. I was ashamed for what I was going through--the fear, the jealousy, the insecurity--and I was afraid that the women were going to have judgments about nonmonogamy, but I knew that I had to do it.
I was super nervous when it was my turn to speak, and I was shaking. I said that I was in an open relationship and that my boyfriend was seeing other people, and that it was really hard for me to deal with my feelings while I was so far away from him and didn't get the chance to reconnect and reground myself with him. I started realizing that the core issue behind my struggles was lack of self-love and lack of trust in the universe, not trusting that things were going to work out okay for me. I started crying.
The women were very loving and supportive about it. Some offered advice and hugs, and one of them said that she heard me say "I just don't have peace" and "I just can't trust" and she asked me if it was okay for her to heal those beliefs for me. I said yes.
That night I slept a lot better than the nights before. I did wake up in the middle of the night but I felt peaceful and trusting, and when I thought of Kean, I felt nothing but love.
I don't know if it's all real but it's definitely therapeutic
On the second day of class I experienced more primitive, relatively uneventful lives. And I got to regress someone else who experienced being a walk-in. That was interesting and a little bit freaky for me.
On the third day of class I got to revisit a life that I had already seen on my own a few years ago and I had dreaded to go back: I was a Nazi, working at a concentration camp, doing experimens with gay men, and I was gay myself. The experience wasn't as bad as I thought though because I was able to see that this person, while doing bad things, was not bad at heart. He was doing bad things out of fear, and he was feeling absolutely terrible about it. He had become "successful" as a Nazi to make his father proud but it had never felt right to him. I was able to forgive him, and I think that was very important for me.
People said that after that experience my energy totally changed. They said I appeared warmer and softer. I took that as a compliment, but the next morning I started crying about it in the car.
Whenever somebody compliments on a positive change in me or any kind of opening, I tend to get defensive and think to myself "Well, what was wrong with me before this happened?" So this morning all of my insecurities about German qualities came back up. When they said "You really seemed to have opened up", what I really heard was "You're not as cold, distant, closed-off, serious, and stiff as you were before." I felt frustrated because I still feel cold, distant, closed-off, serious or stiff more often than I would like to admit. Luckily I brought it up with the class during check-in that morning, and it felt good to get it out, and people thanked me for being so vulnerable. That is my goal - being soft and vulnerable, because I have avoided that for too many years of my life.
And how is this for being vulnerable: The downside of being here is that every night I wake up in the middle of the night and wonder what Kean is doing and if there is anybody else in bed with him. Yep, that's what's happening. I am just being honest. It's not pretty but it's there.
And regarding the conflict about being German I have been struggling with: There is a girl in class who is from Germany as well. She is a psychic healer, and I feel very drawn to her. This is the first time in a really long time (probably over 10 years) that I have felt drawn to somebody German. I have hopes that her presence can help me heal some of the conflict. She said to me that what I detest about German culture is probably what I detest about myself. And she is right on because I don't like how stiff, cold, closed-off, controlling and fearful Germans are, and I am all of those things.
Today something else came up about playfulness. I had noticed for a while that I am really playful and silly with Kean and that I long to have that with other friends as well, but it's hard because we are all adults, and adults don't tend to be very playful unless they are at Burning Man and/or on drugs. So today I saw a past life in Holland where I was a girl living on a rich farm who had no friends. She went to the market place to make some friends but she was too shy to talk to anybody so she just went back home. She really wanted some friends to run around and play in the mud with. When I got out of this regression, my classmate said "You need to just ask for this." Then she and I rolled around on the carpet and had a pillow fight. Then later in class I told people that I was open to being playful with any of them. After class, one of the women grabbed my arm, and we skipped to my car together. This may seem silly but silly is what I want, and I consider this progress.
I feel so blessed to be here right now. Joya, the woman who runs the Sedona Ashram where I am staying wrote a book called Ave Maria, which I am now reading in my spare time. Like me, she has a very deep connection to the Virgin Mary. The book is about Joya's spiritual journey.
Every time we reassemble for class (which happens three times a day: in the morning, after lunch, and after dinner), I feel like I am full of energy, love and light. I feel so safe here, and most of my thoughts are positive. The worry and anxiety that I usually feel as my default emotional undercurrent are mostly absent.
All of the people in class are women, and most, if not all, of them are older than me. I think the oldest one is 68. It feels a little bit like I'm in Steel Magnolias, but with soft love instead of tough love.
On the first day of class the teacher demonstrated past life regression with someone who regressed back into a very primitive, peaceful Native American life. It felt like exactly the kind of primitive tribal life I have recently been yearning for. When she opened her eyes at the end, she recognized all of us in the circle as her circle from back then, her small peaceful tribe. I am convinced that I was there with her because I had immediately felt a connection with her when I had first seen her on the first day of class.
That afternoon I experienced a past life in which Kean and I had our genders reversed. I was a wizard and he was a witch, and we were living in a polyamorous witch society sometime in Europe, probably a few hundred years ago. All we did was magic and healing, and people from nearby towns gave us food and fabric and other materials in exchange for healings. That's how we survived. Kean and I became a couple and did lots of rituals together. We built energetic castles that we sat in. We time traveled together to modern American cities, and we saw that people had a lot of negative feelings regarding sex and relationships. The two of us created a circle around a fire with us facing each other and all of our other lovers completing the circle, and we had a healing ritual so that people would feel healthier and more positive about sex and relationships in the future. It was beautiful and magical.
The rocks are beautiful here, and the energy is even more beautiful. I am staying at the Sedona Ashram. I have my own bedroom and bathroom in a two-bedroom apartment. The other bedroom is empty so far. The living-room is a meditation room. I didn't get a key because "we don't lock the doors here." I like this kind of trust.
Last night I slept in Barstow, CA. That was interesting too because I used to live not far from there, in Victorville.
I miss the Kean but I'm also glad that I'm here by myself. He and I tend to stay up late and sleep in late. Here, I intend to get up early, go to class, come home and meditate, and then go to bed early.
I'm leaving for Arizona tomorrow to partake in a week-long past life regression training. I am driving and expect to arrive in Sedona on Sunday evening. I will have internet access while I'm there, so you can expect to hear from me.
For a while I had been wanting to wear something radically different to Death Guild. I wanted to see what it was like to not conform to the black uniform.
Last night I noticed that I was feeling uninspired about my Death Guild outfit. I had no ideas and couldn't get excited about anything. So I decided that that was going to be the night I wore blue jeans and no make-up to Death Guild.
I feel a little bit like a cheater because 1) I went to Death Guild with my hot boyfriend. So already I had an implied approval, despite my outfit. 2) I have a lot of friends that go to Death Guild. So I was never the plain green girl that nobody talks to.
In a way the experiment might have been more interesting if I had gone dressed like this to a goth club where I don't know anybody. But in another way, the fact that I knew people made it especially interesting because how were they going to react to my different look?
So this is what happened. I was nervous and told Kean that if I ever needed some support, I would come grab him. (I never made use of this privilege.) I brought some black boots and a black hoodie that I left in the car, just in case they didn't let me in.
They did let me in. I don't know if it's because they recognized my face and/or Kean, or because there actually is no dress code.
The first thing I noticed was that people I didn't know, especially the highly made-up ones, avoided eye contact with me. Maybe I was projecting but I could have sworn that that black-haired, eye-linered stranger would have shared a glance and a smile with me, had I worn one of my typical dark princess outfits, but he didn't even look at my green-hoodied self.
Kean went off somewhere, and I stood next to the dance floor by myself, taking in the scene. A blond guy approached me and said "Didn't they tell you that people wear black here?"
"Oh, I know. I am doing a social experiment," I said. Again, I felt like I was cheating because this automatically put me higher on the social ladder. I wasn't ignorant of the system; I was challenging it.
The blond guy actually seemed a lot like the character I was pretending to be. I'm pretty sure it was his first time at Death Guild. Maybe he thought I was a kindred spirit.
Next I ran into my friend Michael. It was his first time at Death Guild as well. He didn't even say anything about my outfit. It probably made no difference to him what I was wearing.
Then I talked to a friend I hadn't seen in a while. She used to be one of the most eye-catching people at Death Guild, with a colorful double mohawk. Lately she has sometimes been spotted wearing a hoodie and a baseball cap. Tonight she looked a little on the plain side as well, but at least she was wearing black. She said she had been dressing down because she just didn't have time to put a lot of energy into her outfits lately. Out of all my friends, it was interesting that she was the one who had experience dressing down, when she has also been one of the most outrageous-looking Death Guilders.
My friend William looked right past me and didn't even see me. I demanded his attention by waving my hand in front of his face, and his eyes went wide and he looked me up and down. "You look different!" he said.
To my surprise Kristen was wearing blue jeans as well. She hadn't had time to change. She was also the first person to tell me "You're still hot."
I ran into Nightshade at the bar, and he said that not wearing black at an all-black event is kind of like going to a potluck dinner without bringing any food and then drinking everybody's beer. I like that analogy. I guess I was feeling a little rude with my green hoodie.
The bartender called me "green girl."
Several of my friends didn't recognize me, and I had to catch their attention. But once I had their attention, my outfit didn't matter anymore, and our connection was the same.
I got introduced to a girl that previously I had only known via hearsay and through MySpace messages. I said "It's me, Vera." Then I felt the need to explain to her that I didn't look like this all the time, that I was just doing a social experiment tonight. That conversation ended up really awkward.
Once I settled in on the bench upstairs with a drink and some friends, I totally forgot about my experiment. It was just me and my friends, socializing, hanging out, like always. But when I got up on the dance floor for the first time, I felt very strange again.
At some point I noticed that I was still doing my Death Guild stride, which is quite effective when wearing a billowing skirt over platform boots and dramatic make-up. It showed me that I have a certain level of confidence and awareness of my attractiveness, no matter what I am wearing. Of course I didn't catch as many people's attention with my green hoodie, but the feeling I had inside as I strode was the same.
In sum, I would say that what I learned is this:
My Death Guild friends might not have become my friends if I dressed like this all the time. This is a little bit saddening. But it's also understandable because after all, wardrobe is a common ground on which people can relate to each other. We have a common interest: We like to wear black; we like big boots. We have other things in common as well, but we might never have found those out if our outer appearances hadn't connected us in the first place.
My friends will still like and appreciate me, no matter what I am wearing. This became very obvious over the course of the evening, and it was very comforting. The connection is already established, and it would take a lot more than a boring outfit to break it.
I had a very fun and interesting evening, but I am really looking forward to wearing something dark and dramatic again next time. It just makes me feel like more of an active participant in the event. I prefer being a doer to being a spectator. I also prefer attracting attention to avoiding attention. This is nothing new, but it has been nice to see what the alternative is like.
Here is a video from a fashion show I did for Gibbous last month. You can see me on the runway starting at 2:12. I am glad that the part where snot dripped out of my extremely runny nose didn't make it into the video.
The first person I called after finding out Obama had won was my ex-boyfriend Aaron. We were living together in Virginia in 2000 when Bush was first elected. We had watched the election together, horrified when it was first called for Gore and then later went to Bush.
This year Aaron has been doing a lot of work to support the Obama campaign. Yesterday, for instance, he had been up since 4am, trying to get people to vote in Reno, NV, a swing state. I am so proud of him.
And I am so proud of the state of Virginia for voting for Obama this year.
I was sitting in my car at 16th and Market, on the way to my friend Linda's birthday celebration. I was listening to KMEL, the Bay Area's hip hop station. At 20:02 the announcer came on and said "We did it."
At first I thought he was only talking about how Obama had won California, but then I realized that he was saying that Obama had won the presidential election. People were screaming and dancing and honking all around me. I got goosebumps, and then I started crying. I could feel the whole world change in that instant, at 20:02.
My friend Antonio later said that this means that "collective consciousness has shifted." I believe that's true. I feel that collective consciousness has shifted from something negative and fearful to something positive and hopeful.
. And the very last paragraph provided a clue for me. Her mother had just died:
