July approaches summer’s ripeness. In Koh Phangan, the sun has been rotting my skin since February. In my wooden house in the hills of the northeast corner of the island, I swing back and forth between the physical and the liminal—trying to figure out how to exist in both. My body fragments in the sweltering heat as it stretches me to see what is lurking in the spaces unseen. 

Every day is the same. My eyes blink open to the light of a newborn sun at 6:15am. The swell of the cricket chorus arrives at 8:08am. The sound of hammers and chainsaws from the construction next door begins at 9am. By 2pm, the relentless heat fills the house and my mind begins to melt under the peaking sun. Lethargy sets in. At 6pm, the animals and trees grow tired from the day’s work and they morph into their night forms. A renewed sense of peace falls on the house along with the descending sun. For a brief moment it is just me and the dwindling day. By 8pm, the evening creatures have come to join me in the darkened house. Geckos scurry on the walls, moths come to play with my phone torch, and small black beetles pepper themselves on the bathroom tiles. My legs hurt and I am delusional by 10pm. I crawl into bed and let the night take me. 

Spending days on end alone in this house is a constantly evolving dance between my personal euphoria and hell. Days in solitude and silence. Speaking to no one but the elements that whisper in my ear. My own flow becomes sacred—a mirror that reflects in the condition of my surroundings. When I am in peace, so is the house. When I am in turmoil, so is the house. 

Nature becomes my lover and my partner. Sometimes it makes me cry—on the rare day that rain crashes through my bedroom window and knocks the village into an evening blackout. Sometimes it brings me pleasure—in the morning when my eyes scan the mountains that stretch into the sky. Sometimes it brings me to my knees—in the afternoon when the energy is convulsing and boiling over, with nowhere to hide from the pulse of the heat. The constant routine of Earth around me illuminates the chaos that continues within me. Everything that is unnatural feels disgusting against the beauty of my surroundings. My lover asks me to come closer. My partner asks me to do better. 

Classical Chinese Medicine texts say that late summer is when Heaven and Earth are the closest to each other. The two dimensions begin to coalesce, and it becomes easier for our dense plane to intertwine with the spirit realm. For these few weeks, we have the chance to work even closer with the upper realms. Ask the Heavens to reach down and clean out our decaying trash, so we are left only with our true treasures to harvest in autumn. 

In July, I surf this wave that flows back and forth between the physical and the liminal, the dense and the light. With each passing day, the heat rises and the veil grows thinner. July asks me to die again. But it’s not the graceful, serene death of winter—it’s the rotting, decaying, purging, pile-of-shit kind of death. It’s uncomfortable and frustrating and sublime, and it makes me want to crawl out of my body and go one of two ways—into the ground or up towards the sky. Heaven and Earth crush me between their two dimensions, forcing me to feel the pain and the weight of my own impurities. 

This kind of death does not lead to rebirth. It leads me to a place frozen in time. I didn’t realize it, but I got distracted. I lost my devotion, I lost my way. In an attempt to be loved, to feel safe, I left my body and placed her in a holding cell—until one week in July 2025, when I unknowingly released her and allowed her to show me everything that once was. Free at last, she brings me to the rock bottom of Earth and to the euphoric edges of Heaven. 

Each morning in July I stand at my altar and pray for release from a heavy inflammation simmering in my physical body. My organs cry out in pain, my skin swells, my mind clouds with fatigue. A presence of unprocessed emotions is so stuck in the walls of my body that I no longer recognize myself. My thoughts are twisted and my actions written with despair. 

On 7/7 I traveled to the easternmost point of Koh Phangan to visit a wellness center located on a secluded bay. Only accessible by boat, the bay is flanked by towering stone and palm trees that pop out of the mountain like a pineapple top. Each bungalow is built around the sloping jungle terrain that it lives on. In the morning, the sun rises on the sea and light glimmers on the water, creating a million diamonds dancing into the horizon. From the moment I step onto the bay, I begin to purge. Thoughts of longing and regret unearth from out of nowhere, and my body lulls me into deep sleep across sweaty afternoons and nights. I fast and detox for four days. My body eliminates years of emotional, physical and mental toxins. By the time I sail away from the bay, I can finally feel light entering my body again. 

Little did I know, the body was not done with me yet. A few days after I returned from the detox, I had an accident and injured my ankle. I was unable to walk properly for a week and am taken through yet another dissolve of the physical body. The injury is another purge orchestrated to force me to sit even closer to myself. In the stillness, my patterns of addiction, victimization, depression, and fear engulf me. 

The influence of these negative frequencies is a heavy force on the body and mind. I can’t say I got out of this darkness with my sheer willpower. It required alignment between the two realms. A renewed devotion to Spirit, and a heavy dose of discipline in the physical world—pure thoughts, pure action, the generosity of friends, two days of water fasting, reestablishing a loving connection to my body—to shift me back up and into the density of light. 

It all started with a wish—a prayer that began in the early days of July, that took me down this road to detox, injury, relapse, and finally—upgrade, or remembering. 

Maybe it is Heaven’s way to break down our physical body in order to initiate the work to fulfill our prayers. Sometimes the body has become so riddled with disease that it needs to crack, bloat, ache, in order to push us to detox, to change, to break more open to the truth. This is nature’s way. We cast our wishes, we relinquish our bodies to the process of dying and opening again, and we evolve. The physical body is a vessel to hold the light, the ideas and the actions of the divine. In the Heavens you wish it; on the Earth you build it. 

July has ended and now it is time to mobilize in the resonance of Heaven penetrating Earth. Break open your body, dissolve the shadows, and step into the light that is waiting for you. Heaven on Earth is here. Will you choose to live in it?