This is a post I waited on sharing, but had been percolating for weeks. I’m glad that I waited, as the energy of the last week on our journey brought ideas that initially clicked things on, into the experience of being. This may push some buttons or be challenging to fully comprehend as is meant, but I’m called to share it nonetheless and waited until it felt anchored enough within me to do so.

The details of the message I felt inspired to write about actually channeled through on one of our hikes a couple of months ago. That’s where I get most of my big epiphanies and download, integrate and/or shift a lot – while I’m hiking out in Nature.

There’s always something profound that happens when I’m out moving energy and breathing in that raw essence. Regardless of whether something seemingly significant happens on the hike or not, something significant can happen within, simply by my fully opening my channels and senses. So, time moving out in nature has proven to be my greatest classroom.

I’ve mentioned in the past how my inner dialogue becomes my own philosophical discussion where I quite naturally take on three roles within…two voices that go back and forth about contrasting perceptions and an observer who listens, transmutes, and works the alchemy of it all. Sounds complicated when I spell it out, but I assure you it happens fluidly without thought in the moment. It’s simply my way.

The particular discussion in my head that day was about exploring contrasting definitions of how we experience things and how even when we think we’re taking what we might think is a so-called more progressed approach, how even within that there in fact still can be judgment and we have further still we can go with detaching from the words and ideas we have become accustomed to.

And in so doing, having the potential for deepening into a Middle Way and navigating by untethered energy streams.

That may not be where everyone’s headed or desires to go, but since it is my path, discussions like this take center stage for me and I share them in case they stir any seed that you might be exploring too.

What I discovered was that I had more I wanted to release and transmute, and that day of inner dialogue hugely transformed and freed me, yet again.

Even in many “spiritual” or what some might call “new age” circles, I often find the dialogue no longer to resonate with me. Not that it’s right or wrong, but that my view point and resonance has shifted the more I journey down the path I’m on. I think we all, at some point or another, and likely many times in our lives, come to those turning points where we outgrow something like a too tight pair of jeans, until the next and the next pair. It’s an ever-evolving experience.

This particular day I kept running the voices in my head that I was hearing over and over:

“You don’t have to experience things so harshly.”

“Everything can be a gentle experience, rather than dramatic or harsh.”

Gentle, soft, beautiful, easy, without trauma versus intense, hard, dramatic, messy, and traumatic.

Do you notice the either or descriptions here that subconsciously impart a better and worse experience even if one doesn’t say that?

We have a particular conditioned reference point for everything and the words we use are attached to these energy triggers they carry.

I hear and have said myself, things don’t need to be “such and such” – usually referencing that hard or harsh wasn’t necessary and easy and gentle could be the new intention.

And while that’s all true, it’s still only half the story.

Magickal experiences are about flow and alignment and any experience truly can be in flow and alignment if we navigate and respond to them as such.

Without going too far into the energetic dynamics of things, as that’s for another time and space, basically yes, we can experience things in a different way than we currently are. The key here being a choice.

However, I find that there is a subconscious charge placed on those choices and specifically “harsh” or “gentle” ones that in fact still is a judgment even if it’s sugar-coated as a spiritual “intention.”

The place I’m being taken is the exploration beyond both and still encompassing both.

On my hike, the widening perspective that continues to beckon me further down a Middle Way path with a come-here finger, had me feeling off, as these voices swirled around in my head. I began to see how these phrases and words no longer resonated, even though they were ones I used so often myself.

I began to see how this was creating division that I didn’t want to fuel further.

What I arrived at was this.

You certainly CAN choose or intend to have any type of experience you want…”harsh, gentle, intense, easy, etc.” But I feel that when we put emphasis on things being easy or gentle only if they look a certain way, this doesn’t mean that that IS THE WAY, nor does it mean that it’s THE BETTER WAY.

We can experience anything that comes our way in a variety of responses, but our responses are instead funneling through as conditioned reactions most of the time and not necessarily coming from our higher selves’ innate wisdom.

The trick being to not have a judgment, attachment, or charge around what you intend and don’t intend, and simply know that it’s your choice of intention just like you get to choose what color you want to wear that day or thing you want to eat. But it’s not better or worse. It JUST IS.

Being human is like being a kid in a candy store – you get to choose any kind of candy you want to taste, but they’re all still just candy here for you to try.

If someone chooses a particular path, that doesn’t make them any less than someone who chooses a different one. They’re just different. How the person relates to and responds to their path is what makes the difference relative to that person alone. It sets up the relationship for the experience.

Let me try to explain.

Let’s say I asked for answers and a sign about how I could make certain changes in my life or receive the answers I needed. In the interim, I may even have neglected listening to some inner messaging that arrived about how I would do better if I slowed down or took some down time to nurture myself and rest more so I could recharge and clear my mind. And then maybe I found myself missing a step on the staircase and falling and breaking my ankle. Some might say this was a way to get my attention and create the space for me to do that – rest and recharge – since I was having a hard time listening to other messages. Some might also say, well, if you had listened then it didn’t have to come in such a harsh and traumatic way. Or, to back up even further, if you had intended that you only receive things in a gentle way, then you wouldn’t have broken your ankle. And still some may say, that was merely a random and unfortunate “accident.”

In any of these cases, harsh/ankle break is being deemed as less than or not the ideal.

Easy and gentle/without ankle break is being deemed as more than or more ideal.

It’s not stated, but it’s implied.

However, what if any way something unfolds simply just IS. And we deem it harsh or gentle, easy or hard, simple or traumatic all on our own?

The Universe doesn’t judge things. They are simply all experience. So, in fact, those that say it’s “just an accident” might be on to something – “it’s just an experience” or “it’s just energy moving through a particular expression.”

But subconsciously we’ve been conditioned to think that a broken ankle is a horrible thing. That pain is wrong or bad. That we could choose more wisely and have everything go in the vein of this idea of what smoothly and gently is because that’s deemed as the better way.

But what if our perception, interpretation, response, and experience of the experience is what could ultimately be the game changer, and not the experience itself?

What if we flowed with anything that showed up and THAT was the alchemy and magick? That anything could be smoothly and gently received and processed, allowing the natural flow of things to simply unfold without stopping to latch on to attaching judgments to something or halting the movement of energy expressing itself.

Not changing the results, but changing our relationship to the result.

Seeing the gift in anything and that something is only harsh if we believe that it is and fuel thoughts around that definition.

If I break my ankle, it could be like anything else in life….and I could fluidly and seamlessly embrace it and immediately thank it for the gift just as I would anything else, have gratitude and go about my day. I could move forward without spending endless time analyzing it, researching the metaphysical modalities about it, and judging it, wondering why or how I could have had a so called “better and more gentle” experience.

I could love my body and soul wisdom for gifting me something it knows better than my ego does as to what it has to give to my experience or better yet, simply say “thank you” just as I would to something deemed gentler. I could relate to everything as an energetic expression I am given the choice of response to. I could live with greater awareness and consciousness to all experiences and their value and place in things and see the gift in all things. I could begin a new relationship and dialogue with experience in general, understanding the incredible miracle that inherently lives within all experiences and all feelings or expressions.

And of course, I can also not do these things and choose to relate differently to it than I just shared, or our individual energy signature can choose to dance in what feels most resonant and intriguing since we’re all different.

After all, the gift in being human is to be able to immerse in the full gamut of feelings and experiences not possible in other dimensional realms of consciousness and that includes every single kind you can think of. Experience and feeling is an art form itself…a miracle…and our spirit can assist us in understanding and integrating the diverse duality presenting itself.

I’m merely describing another possible pathway we may not have considered quite as much as the either or approaches and sharing my own personal experience of transformation down that path in case it speaks to you too.

And rather than try to teach myself how NOT to have certain kinds of experiences, I could teach myself how to relate differently to them so that the charge is removed and a widening of perspective can root. I believe this can also open us up to experiencing greater capacity for unconditional love and compassion. At least, that’s what I’m noticing.

This is something I’ve been exploring and working with a lot more in recent years, but this next layer has only felt to anchor, beyond just mentally “getting it,” and this is changing everything in a much more freeing way.

When things go to the subconscious and emotional core levels of change, embodiment is then accessible.

This is where I find myself….deepening into a Middle Way and while this isn’t a new concept, as I mentioned but will share again, it clicked past those surface or mental layers and anchored into my core and subconscious in a way it hadn’t fully before – the no boundary way.

And like with other things and words or ideas, I am now releasing this way of expressing things. Just like I don’t resonate with the expression “being of service” and asking, “how can I serve?” along with the conditioned definition of this because it anchors what I feel to be a deep enslavement energy in our DNA that has been latently running the show, I am also being very conscious of how I relate to all experiences and dropping certain phrases that don’t feel to encompass nonattachment.

I listen to how I speak and I do my best to explore and expand when it feels limiting in some way or I get the sense something’s off or charged.

Again, this isn’t for everyone, as we are each forging different pieces of the whole and none are better or worse. This is just the next deepening leg of my own path and I share it merely as a potential catalyst for curiosity, thought, and exploration to anyone who might be interested or perhaps might have been journeying similarly.

Since July 8th and the New Moon of the 9th after that, I’ve noticed increased activation of things and rooting of energies. And this current road trip we found ourselves on has been revealing the shifts quite literally in experience and reflecting through photos in things I’ve later found showing up.

There’s been a surreal quality to everything, but it’s only increased my experience of more deepening into this merging point and a desire to continue on the trajectory of this Middle path I’m on.

I’ve shared some of these photos laced throughout this post. They are from our time in the Redwoods and along the coastal region of Northern California and up into Oregon. Some of them capturing in between elements of how I felt and not really being here nor there.

And others capturing what was showing up and being experienced along the way in reflection to that.

We explored a different part of the Redwood forests before heading back to the coast. The energy was a lot different… very high vibed, more active life rather than time standing still, and filled with unusual encounters. But what I noted was the mirroring of energies showing up during the 2 1/2 mile loop hike (our favorite amongst these Giants so far) and it proved to be activating this other level of experience I’m sharing about here.

Everything was stepping forth, rather than in the background and was a literal opening of doorways between worlds, as a new reality emerges.

It all started at the Immortal Tree, which has survived lightning that removed its top 50 feet (it still stands at 248 feet and is 950-1000+ years old), a logger’s axe, forest fire in 1908 and flood in 1954 (these are all marked on the tree), but is still going strong!

Nothing can take it down and this is why this ancient Redwood is called the Immortal Tree.

The following photos are of this tree and surrounding area.

Look at all that incredible energy beaming through!

It reflected to me our resiliency, but also eternal and expansive being.

I connected strongly here with this tree and the energy seemed to speak back to us what I felt.

It also encouraged me on with where I feel called.

After this we explored an area of the forest that was different than the rest, lying between it all.

I noticed wild clover flowers and baby blue hydrangea for the first time, pockets of birds singing, and a more alive feeling dancing around everything.

This is where all the light and energies showed up around me, which are in the photos you see near the beginning.

But this is also where we encountered Great Horned Owl.

I had just found what looked like a druid, Merlin, or forest guardian naturally etched on a tree with long beard and hair (see below) and then we heard a large group of jays chattering like crazy around a tree.

A man with long gray beard and hair to his chest then appeared on the path with a tiny dog and said, “did you see the owl?”

He then proceeded to take us back a few steps to a better clearing to show us what you see in the photo below.

The jays weren’t happy about the owl being there and were stirring up a ruckus. After moving on I then found the only feather I’d seen in the forest, which appeared to be a small owl feather, although a different species…perhaps barn owl.

We both remarked this was our favorite area so far in the Redwoods. It was definitely otherworldly and in between realms.

Had perhaps my continued conviction toward piercing through the veils and creating a merged way helped to open this portal?

The more we can embody what we want to see, the more we experience it because the energy is a match.

On our transition over state lines we were stopped by a small herd of elk crossing the highway and not long after I saw two dead possums – first a lighter one and then a darker one – on the side of the road.

On our first stop into Oregon we immersed in many walks and hikes along several beaches where I continued finding so many treasures and reflections of what I had come to learn.

A contrast of dead to this world and alive to this world creatures mirrored to me there was only a thread separating them, although they existed on flip sides of the same hinge of the doorway of perception.

Physical death being a birthing into awareness of eternal consciousness and physical being a birthing into temporal life and death of eternal awareness. Neither better or worse, but could we in fact have placed judgments and attachments on one over another because we are so deeply invested in a particular side of the hinge of perception?

And in doing so, have we limited our scope of the possibility within the very things we judge or deem not to be ideal?

I started to have a very different experience with each transitioned being that I found.

I think it’s interesting and not surprising that I always find SO many dead animals, parts of animals, bones, feathers, etc., as I continue to walk this path.

And I’ve noticed my interaction has shifted greatly to include a fascination with the essence and stories I hear from each.

I kept finding mystical dead sea birds each time I walked a different beach – about 8 in total, and a beautiful small and large dead crab, but then so many incredible sea creatures still in this world too – including a fav of mine – starfish!

Or, as I call them, star people.

I found 17 in all, in vibrant colors – my fav were the orange ones!

I discovered a huge cosmic looking jellyfish – just like a space craft – and saw many smaller ones too.

They spoke depths to me.

Then there were these amazing gooseneck barnacles that I LOVED because they looked just like dragon babies hatching, which was fun after having seen this written on a rock not long before:

Everywhere I go, I discover more keys to expansion and why this human experience has presented itself and even these current times are as they are.

There is SO much more than even what we think we get a glimpse of, now and then.

Looking out at the vast ocean before me I am once again a pilgrim of the Cosmos on one of the greatest, immersive expeditions called Earth.