• Practice BEing in the NOW.
• Make BEing an embodiment of love, evolutionary consciousness and self mastery your priority.
• BE the fullest version of Self you can be.
• BE an embodiment and loving protector of freedom, yours and other’s.
• Master your ego and mind, teach them to serve Self and Source/Life/the Divine.
• BE better at balancing internal contrasts (work/rest, action/receptivity, yin/yang, etc.) and expand your wellbeing, resilience and joy.
• Express more of your honest and heartfelt love, gratitude and appreciation to those around you. It is still too rare in our world and we all can do better.
• Live from your Soul’s vision, not from current circumstances or trending narratives.
• Expect life to evolve and work out in ways that best serve your growth and expansion.
• Trust the timing of your life’s unfolding and keep showing up best you can while practicing patience.
• Learn to guard and preserve your energy with discernment, your balance and energetic sovereignty are more important than adhering to social scripts or traditions.
• Move into new adventures, opportunities, paths and challenges with your ALL.
• Focus on your sphere of influence, on who you can BE, what you can do or co-create in service of higher consciousness.
• Witness everything with zero point consciousness and detachment, allowing yourself to know the observed from all perspectives without treating any one perspective preferentially. 
• Reject the baits of dualistic narratives, divisive ideas and ideologies, and anything else that feeds ego-trips on superiority.
• Know your ego’s triggers and disarm them by healing the underlying pain, shame or distorted beliefs. 
• Keep releasing attachments to identity, self and narratives.
• Listen deeply to others, beyond the opinions and identifications they express. 
• Discern their underlying motivations, woundings, patterns and limitations and meet them with kindness, compassion and love as much as you possibly can.
• Be selective in the choice of the company you keep, surrounding yourself with those who are striving for learning, growth, and expansion of consciousness while integrating the ego into a position of service.
• Be mindful and discerning in engaging with people who are ego-driven, meeting them from love and compassion. Give yourself permission to decline engagements whenever they could be detrimental to your wellbeing and vibration.
• Prioritize, cultivate, balance and nurture your chosen relationships with an abundance of love and energy. 
• Be an ambassador of honesty, compassion and kindness to all you encounter.
• BE kind to yourself, taking exceptionally good care of your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual body in all the ways they need to be flexible, adaptive, resilient, strong and open to Self-leadership.
• Listen to guidance, intuition and symbols which meet your awareness every day. 
• Honor the sacredness of life, remember to begin with yours and the lives of loved ones. 
• Keep serving life – always and in all ways you are called to.
• Keep sharing your gifts, insights, wisdom and love with generosity of heart and soul.

Photography:  @mjrodriguez7 by David Dunan

The post Vision for the new Cycle appeared first on Venuskind.

Photography by Unknown

The post Closing The Ranks appeared first on Venuskind.

The sly power of dysfunctional romantic conditioning and the repetitive nature of ego, shadow and subconsciousness is truly fascinating and at times daunting.

At least this time around it wasn’t spent in confusion, delusion or unconsciousness but under the guidance of my Self and in high awareness and observer mode. The idea being that if I do this with full awareness and and full allowing it would be a last experience to close out the pattern and cycle equally. I am so grateful for the humorous way my Self teaches me about the patterns of my small self and the enchanting way I am called home to be loved on and showered with gifts from Spirit once the lessons are learned. 

Every disappointing relationship, betrayal, manipulation, abuse, injustice, denigration or selfish behavioral pattern I have been confronted with has helped me to unlearn the “good girl” programming and to prioritize my relationships with Self and Source before ALL else. 

I am grateful to my teachers, catalysts and mirrors who have led me home to the place which fills my being with love, bliss, wellbeing and balances what needs balance. Please understand, though, if I choose to no longer engage with you or keep you in my experience when you cannot meet me on the levels of relating I prefer. I trust you will find countless others who will avail themselves for the continuation of the ego games we played or who will help you awaken and reach for more or better ways of relating.

I am grateful for the relationships and soul kin who relate with me on dimensions of reciprocity, compassion, generosity, integrity, creativity, ease, bliss, love and most of all on the dimension of Spirit. Without you I could have never survived and thrived through the karmic load of the old cycle. Thank you for being in my life and making me laugh! 

I am ready to leave these experiences, patterns, beliefs, karma, dynamics and people behind me and to welcome more of the balanced and holistically fulfilling relationships into my life which mirror my expanding relationship with Self. Thank you Source for always teaching and loving me through all my experiences.

May we collectively transcend the darkness of the old scripts and rise into the light of loving, equal, sovereign and generous relating!

Photography: Tony Thornburg by Unknown

The post Laughing and Reflecting appeared first on Venuskind.

“Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.”                                                  ~ Nayyirah Waheed

These moments are some of the most bittersweet to be had in romantic love. Moments of almost good relationships which leave parts of us unmet. I am speaking here of parts that are key to our wellbeing and happiness in life not just superficial egoic desires.

There are many different ways we deal with such a painful or sad experience: avoidance, denial, adaptation – aka self-sacrifice – in the name of love which leads to resentments and dysfunctional dynamics of suffering, futile battles to get ones needs met by nagging, seducing or cajoling the other or any mix of these.

And then there is becoming very still, going inwards to sense, feel and know our truth and be brutally honest and crystal clear with ourself. Choosing to sit and ponder what is unmet, why it is of importance for this to be met, how to meet this part of ourselves with love, compassion and gentleness and sitting with the pain, frustration, sadness, disillusionment as we let the messages of our body in the form of sensations and flitting images guide us through this process of intimacy with self. Firmly committed to face the reality of our experience as it is, to observe and know it without the embellishments and distortions of our mind, asking for the deeper truth to be known, the hidden aspects to be seen and to listen intently and with tender compassion as it unravels within us.

Being a lovingly protective mother to all our tender and prickly parts, a fierce warrior in creating safety, space and love for them and their need to be heard, a magician in manifesting diverse sources of joyful and free fulfillment of our needs, a weaver of a network of love, connection and healing within as well as without, a sovereign being who takes full responsibility for herself.

This is the path of self love and becoming I choose every time I find myself alone on a bridge. 

It is good to know that all I need is within me and within my life, regardless if someone can find their way to the bridge or not. I am grateful for the knowing:

“There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.”

Photography by Sasin Tipchai

The post The Bridge appeared first on Venuskind.

I stopped congratulating people on their birthdays

This is a rather funny thing to me as I wasn’t allowed to celebrate birthdays into my early 20’s due to being in a christian fundamentalist cult that strictly forbade it. Then upon leaving the cult, as part of my deprogramming, I started celebrating birthdays. And now here I am stepping back from it, for at least a year, to challenge myself to find more authentic, spontaneous and inspired ways of expressing my appreciation for another’s being and my gratitude for our connection.

Beyond that lie a few more mystical or spiritual reasons of no longer wanting to consent to time divisions, manipulation of our natural cyclical nature by virtue of clocks and unaligned calendars and the trance of aging. But those are of a more ethereal, subtle and non-verbal nature to me and hard for me to put in accessible writing just yet. I have the feeling I will come back to this later this year.

It is fascinating to observe how strong the pull to comply with our social codes feels (peer pressure, conditioning), especially when social media platforms like Facebook enforce them without the choice of opting out of birthday reminders. It has become a daily practice of internal dialogues to detach myself from the emotional responses to not congratulating a loved one. 

Often asking myself why is it so hard to not be a part of choir of celebration? 

Don’t I trust my friends to know, sense and feel how much I love them without this formulaic ritual?

Who taught me that it was unloving or uncaring if I expressed my appreciation on any other given day but not this one? And what is that based on?

I started writing intentional and authentic messages of appreciation & expressing feelings of appreciation and gratitude whenever I feel them

I have held myself to a code of integrity and honesty for most of my life. Therefore I do not make a compliment that is not truthful and if I have nothing kind and appreciative to say I remain quiet. That took some practice and unlocked a deeper dimension of meaning and value to the words of affirmation, validation, appreciation and praise I speak – as they are heartfelt, honest and not serving an egoic manipulative agenda. At least not to my conscious knowing.

In reflecting on my expressions of appreciation I realized a while back that though I have achieved integrity and honesty in these I still allowed societal or cultural programmings to hold me back from expressing them as often as I felt and thought them. Thereby denying the other whose existence, deeds or expressions allowed me to tap into beautiful frequencies of gratitude, awe, adoration, admiration and appreciation to partake of it and become aware of who they truly are. This felt unbalanced and quite lacking to me. So I intended to express these feelings and thoughts as often as they occurred or I could make space to express them, to make it my intent and conscious practice of giving and mirroring back to those who enrich and illuminate my life. And so I brave the dangers of being misunderstood, judged or made fun of while trusting that what I say reaches the heart of another even if their ego might be incapable of receiving it.

In a world filled with endless messaging and cultural conditioning telling us about our many inadequacies it is a radical act of rebellion to be part of the growing choir of voices that truthfully speak to our gifts, beauty and power.

To me all of these messages are small modern day love notes. Reminiscent of love letters, the forgotten art of speaking to and engaging the ineffable as well as the luminosity of our being. Love notes to God/ the Beloved/ the Divine/ Universe/ Source through their manifestation as this individual consciousness. Expressions of gratitude, delight, pleasure and the enrichment I feel through and with them. 

This choice and practice bring a new dimension of inner alignment, a feeling of rightness and flow of love to my experience I no longer want to be without. And what is more, it has taken even distant acquaintances into a more heartful and nourishing realm of relating. Something our world definitely needs more of…

I would of course never tell you to stop celebrating or congratulating people on their birthdays. It is a rather touchy subject to many for reasons of insecurity and lack of self love or lack of understanding the other’s motives. Yet I would like to inspire you to reflect upon your expressions of appreciation and gratitude towards people in your life.

Do you feel happy with how and how often you express your appreciation? 

Do you feel you could learn or do something to make your words reach their hearts? 

Are you giving yourself enough appreciation and gratitude for all the ways you show up for yourself and others?

Can you come up with fun, playful and inspiring ways of seeding, cultivating and nurturing a culture of authentic, heartful and uplifting appreciation with others around you?

Photography: Balinese girl praying by Gede Lila

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