The energies on Earth are oscillating between the Old and the New. Can you feel it? One day you’re lifted into elevated states of hope, and the next day you’re swung back down to toxic thought patterns and limiting beliefs. More than ever, lessons come at me with an intense sharpness as I attempt to dance through the eternal process of expansion - contraction - expansion - contraction, and so on.

I know I’m not the only one who is going through huge transitions and transformations. Micro reflects Macro and vice versa. The process of awakening while still living in a dysregulated body, a dysregulated society, is incredibly challenging. It creates dissociation, frustration, and fragmentation of self as we attempt to make sense of two disparate worlds - the inner, which is love and harmony, and the outer, which is currently conflicted and dense. 

Here are some main themes that came up for me in August: 

Trapped in fog: Mercury in retrograde for most of August = brain fog, confusion, wtf is mine and who is in my brain? There were many days where I felt like I was going to pass out from the fuzziness. I started lusting after things that I don’t even want, like job titles and a car. I started loathing the people who love me. Years of buried emotions about my family exploded to the surface. My body felt blocked from compassion as it distorted the world around me. 

Relapse: Amidst the fogginess of the month, I started self-harming in the form of binge eating, a coping mechanism I thought I had healed already. Is dissociating a normalized state of being now? ‘Binging’ is an accepted word in our culture. It’s what you do when you want to numb out. 

I am still learning how to move through the world with my hypersensitivity. When I’m not properly processing, cleansing, or regulating, I have a tendency to leave my body. In the past I abused drugs and alcohol to cope. At present my most challenging addiction has been this habit of eating uncontrollably until I can feel my body again. It’s a vicious cycle that presented itself again this month and felt like a full relapse :( All I could do was surrender and try to accept myself in the darkness, knowing that I will have good days and bad days. 

Reclaiming calm and femininity to heal: By now most women know what cycle syncing is. I first learned about it about 4 years ago, but it was only until the past month that I made the connection between cycle syncing and divine feminine energy. The natural inclination of the feminine is to soften and receive. In a world that rewards and requires doing and pushing, day in and day out, female bodies have been robbed of the spaciousness to attune to our body as it fluctuates through each phase of our cycle. 

At the beginning of August I made a promise to myself to honor my inner feminine more deeply. Among other things, this looked like giving up sugar and caffeine, which were two things controlling my addiction cycles (and are arguably also tools of control in the capitalist work system). I wanted to know when my body actually needed rest, and when it was asking me to pull back from doing. One month in and I’ve noticed a profound difference in my energy levels and my ability to tune into my needs. Instead of riding waves of ups and downs, I have loved relishing in sustained calm. 

This takes me to my most important takeaway from August, which is about intuition and trusting myself. I already know what it feels like to listen to my intuition but I want to go deeper. I want there to be less moments of doubting myself and more moments of trust. Even when it feels scary or different from the norm, I wonder what could happen if I surrendered more to my own process and my own desires. Ever since I got back to the U.S. two months ago, it has felt like a battle to cut through the noise of the ads, the programming, the fog of other people’s opinions, and just listen to myself. I hope my newfound sense of calm will help me sink deeper into my intuition, and guide me further into this next level of expansion.