Let’s not wait too Long to Forgive: An Invitation to Coming Home Retreat

Let’s not wait too Long to Forgive:

Numbing out while alive is even more painful than death of a life lived fully self-expressed.

About 5 to 6 years ago, I was asked to complete an assignment for an education course, in Teacher’s College program. The assignment was to write about the experience of learning something difficult. My paper ended up being a real experiential catalyst for a journey I didn’t know I would be taking but it has followed me up to these words today. I wrote about the difficult experience of desiring to forgive my dad, and a sort of prayer/intention of having the chance of having a loving relationship with him. At least knowing more about who he is and so I could pass on stories of him to his grandchildren, were I ever to have any.

I didn’t realize that this assignment actually led me to the pain that lived inside that I finally had started to expose and give language to, and was ready to share with others. This was the work that changed my life, in directing me to the path I am on now, as someone who wishes to support my beloveds in connecting to the power of unconditional Love that is so large, able to hold all of our wounds and give it energy and power for transmuting it into Gold, into glory, beauty and space to live as our more fully expressed Selves.

Prior to joining the Color of Woman teacher training program in 2014, I had already been doing multiple forms of intensive healing and initiate work, yet I couldn’t wrap my mouth around what or who I was, and how to articulate why I had been on this journey and how it could go beyond me, once I had done enough of the therapy work, although some say this is never “fully done”. That may be true, yet Intentional Creativity works in a really powerful way, of shortening the space and time for healing to occur, for us to receive our information, which for some reason can be challenging to explain. The Legend of the Red Thread, so significant to me, my beloveds and community, has deeper ritual that continues to unfold and teach me. It is about our sacred divine connection to one another, an acknowledgement of divine union and purpose of why people come together, why we cross each other’s paths.

Today I run my fingers with the prayer and intention for healing, for bringing my love so deeply and energetically to all my relationships, as a way to complete my forgiveness work, enough so that I have remembered that I have laid them down. My teacher Shiloh Sophia McCloud Lewis teaches that trauma lives within story and image, and that there is a real energy to it as well, a measurable frequency.

I sit here today on my balcony, recently returned to Toronto from my 3 week trip to California, and I have heaviness in my heart, because I have shifted and changed so much. My heart has become more tender, more susceptible to bruising because I want to love with an openness and vulnerability. I love my dad, I love my mother, I want them to know that even though our relationship is what it’s meant to be at this time. I fear losing them and not have the opportunity to say what I want to from the deepest parts of my heart. I am no longer a fighter, unless I really was forced to be, I don’t like fighting anymore, I like loving. I like beauty and prayer, and allowing our hearts to touch one another with each others’ unique heart sounds.

Numbing out while alive is even more painful than death of a life lived fully self expressed through Love.

I pray we can come to a place in our life, where we learn that its time to turn those defenses into sacred tools of creativity. Where we use them to build bridges for one another to cross over and visit into the temple of our hearts and we have tea and biscuits and talk about what our soul needs to express in that moment. Where we have courage to call circles to gather around in ceremony, and lend hearts and hands to those in need, uplift in community, from a paradigm of a oneness, where love is the guiding foundational principle of dictating our policies and rules. It is only when love has entered so deeply into my heart and soul that I don’t fight anymore the forces in society that try to cause fear, separation and anxiety. Instead I choose to cater the love that I harvest in my soul garden, as I spend time in beauty spaces with the Divine, with others, and with my self, mystics saying that they are all one and the same and not at the same time.

I pray that as you read this, you choose to take some time, to find a ball of red thread, and allow yourself to feel what its like to have it all tangled, and then with your heart energy sent to your fingers, and radiating from your being, connected to your Source, you slowly run your fingers and begin to ask for prayer to unknot the tangles. To forgive yourself and others, to be released into the medicine and freedom of Love. To open up to a new possibility in this very moment, even if it leaves an aching gap in your heart, knowing its Love entering into it and taking what no longer needs to be there, in that shape and form. In Intentional Creativity work, we are asked to make them conscious, to speak the stories of those places and experiences, to talk about the shape and form, and let it come out on the page, on the canvas, etc. so that it can live there instead of taking space inside and running our lives.

The result of doing this work always leaves fresh space for new possibilities, new stories, new wonders that can come at the speed of light sometimes, leaving one in complete deep awe.

This is my invitation to you, if you feel ready and feel a deep thirst to drink from the well of love, directly from the breasts of the Great Mother, nourishment for your soul growth, come. Come and sit in circle with us from September 23^rd to September 27^th, at our powerful Soul Retreat called Coming Home, in Muskoka, Ontario. 

Allow yourself to come to this gathering with surrender and trust to receive a new possibility in your relationship to the universe, to yourself, to others and to life. What can be possible for you?

 

BIG LOVE,

Sahar Joya

Intentional Creativity Teacher and Coach
Certified Life Coach

Certified Life Coach

Spiritual Catalyst

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CHOOSING EVOLUTION: Surrendering to the Power of Love and Love as Power

“Thousands of calculations–and innumerable calibrations drawn from kinesiologic testing of individuals and from historical analysis–indicate that the average advance in the level of consciousness throughout the global population is little more than five points during a lifetime. Apparently, even though one undergoes untold millions of individual experiences in one’s life, only a few lessons are usually ever learned. The attainment of wisdom is slow and painful, and few are willing to relinquish familiar views (even if they’re inaccurate); resistance to change or growth is considerable. It would seem that most people would rather die than alter those belief systems that confine them to lower levels of consciousness–if this is true, then what’s the prognosis for the human condition? Is a five-point advance per generation all that can be expected? This troubling question deserves our attention” (Hawkins, David. Power vs. Froce, pg.239-240).

I was thinking today, what is the point of it all? What is the point of me following my vision, like a mad woman, who is going in debt, whose life makes no “ordinary sense”, who has to constantly swim deeper into the unknown, and risk it all to get to the next place in her destination. But why? Crying in the shower, wanting to give it all up but not knowing what else is possible, and reading this quote by Hawkins, I realize a new found strength of why its all worth it. And why we must, even if it is just us that attempts to do the work of elevating our consciousness, there is value in it that is inherent. I mustered the energy to take myself to the gym for my physical practice, to feel that inner fire and strength, to connect to my body, to shake off the energy of fear that wants stagnation, that desires to block and push me off my path, and in my practice the following meditation came through that wanted to be shared here today. There are days where we become so obsessed with TRYING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN that we have our joy stolen, we feel loveless and like shit, and we wonder wow where can I receive some mercy from this inner bully that is attacking me? This post is to stop you, if you have found yourself there, and to take a moment with a cup of tea, and just SLOW DOWN and read. Have this conversation with me, and see what comes up for you. Please feel free to share in the comments section, if you feel called and I will write you back.

Today I take off the garnments of “power”, take off the illusions of “sexy”, or “accomplished” and “ambitious” and I really want to just surrender and get naked into LOVE, into the quality of Beauty. To sink deep into humility, into honor and know that there is a different form of power that resides here, the kind that is the greatest force of creation, one that wields the Sword of clarity in a much different way.

This is much deeper. I am seeing with the eyes of my underwater mermaid, the one who likes to touch the bottom of the ocean to find perception, truth and existence. In the deep dark stillness of the pressure filled water, she finds jewels and gems of soul knowing that may not be easy to identify to the parts of self that like hanging out at the shoreline, for stability, certainty and knowingness.

Return the mirror that has been given to you. And trust that you are so sacred that you will never be harmed by the way of the Great Mother. I surrender to HER and CHOOSE to invite her into every aspect of my life. I see now and I choose to see with that visionary lens of true love.

Knowing that I have that capacity, knowing that I have that gift. I have been granted it by her, by my creators, by Love. How did I come to forget who I was? How did I come to forget that my creators made Love to make me?

I gave up that way of creating and started to trust that I could create with love, that I can be nourished if I ask my Divine mother and father for love. And that they are waiting with spoon fills of yummy food to nourish and grow me. SHE IS HERE. HE IS HERE. THEY DO LOVE ME. (Many of us, I think all of us, no matter how “perfect” or “loving” our parents were, or rather how they weren’t, carry woundings around the masculine and feminine, and the mother and father archetype. For me, in my journey and work, I have found it to be the way to come back to my connection to my Divine parents and to know that we must make this reunion to better understand our relationship with our parents or the lack there of, and with the masculine and feminine in a way that is outside of the patriarchal definitions that cause us so much heart ache, fear and disconnection).

I can use the sword of clarity and give thanks for seeing what I was shown. The pain may be the illusion being revealed and shed and the part of me that wanted to play that game being called out to say “honey come off into the sidelines we gotta talk for a minute. That thing you were chasing wasn’t real. I needed you to see that because you still thought it was.”

We have to invite love into our bodies, and into our beingness. It’s a really different thing than just saying and assuming and how so many of us walk around disconnected and feeling lost and not even knowing it because we are chasing illusions and ideas…we are no longer after love, we are after illusions of power which somewhere down the line we created an equation that power will buy us safety and security and that will buy us love. Rather than going directly to the source, we assume this is the path, and we struggle, and fight and challenge, and keep hitting walls of achievement that leave us feeling empty, even if our bank accounts are full and our walls are filled with credentials and we even got the “good merit” brownie points of volunteerism or now a days the “Voluntourism”, where we “travel to do good work” across the globe, practicing our privilege of being able to take flight when we please, and using so much more energy that was mostly made possible because those in the other parts of the world we are flying to must create even more to subsidize, and yet this is something that we either don’t know, or doesn’t happen to cross our minds, and if it does as you read this, you may be feeling itchy and irritated in your skin because it is once again doing that tough work of checking and shedding belief systems, that confine one to lower levels of consciousness, when we don’t do the work of critical analysis and reflexivity when we take action to create “good work” in the world.

This is a frequency that we don’t like to vibe at, or listen to, because it brings pain, by touching the places inside us that are filled with illusions. It shatters them immediately as it touches it, and the guards we were wearing for protection FROM LOVE fall off, but we think we are being hurt. Love is actually trying to find its way to us to break us FREE to liberate us from the traps we find ourselves inside, even though what we LONG FOR THE MOST IS THAT DEEP DEEP INTIMATE CONNECTION. That I SEE YOU and YOU SEE ME Third eye, heart connection love depth soul kind of connection. THAT VISION THAT SEES YOU IN ALL OF YOUR BEING AND SAYS WOW HONEY YOU ARE SUNSHINE GLORIOUS! The vision that surprises you because Love is poured on the places that you saw as “ugly”, as broken, incomplete and not enough.

I wonder if you will give yourself permission to be seen by that vision? I wonder if you will take a moment to allow yourself to drop deep inside the ocean of your own soul to really embrace your depth and beauty and heart and love and innocence just right now as you are, not WHEN YOU GET THAT BUSINESS TO BE A SUCCESS, WHEN YOU CHECK THOSE BOXES, WHEN YOU GET THAT PROMOTION, OR WHEN YOU GET THAT RING. NO.

RIGHT NOW! Will you let yourself see the true beauty that you are RIGHT NOW with all the marks and bruises and the chin hair, and the scars, and the pimples, and the wrinkles and the all that you pick on yourself for on a daily basis or worst, when you are in your most vulnerable moments and feeling at your “weakest”.

Let’s take a stance to HONOR OURSELVES right now in this moment, because HONEY LOVE ALREADY DOES. LOVE ALWAYS DID. SINCE BEFORE YOUR INCARNATION and AFTER YOU MOVE ON.

May you find the gentleness in your being this weekend, as the US celebrates Independence day. We are not INDEPENDENT, that weekend celebration was coaxed on an illusionary idea of what and how power can be defined. We are INTER-DEPENDENT beings, so lets give up the whole idea of “doing it by myself” and start to surrender to the power of CO-CREATION with SOURCE, with TRUE POWER which is only ALIGNED WITH LOVE. SURRENDER INTO HER AND HIS GLORY, INTO THE EMBRACE OF THE DIVINE as you are in this moment knowing you will be caught with oodles of loving joy and care.

If you find yourself in a difficult place on the journey to elevating your consciousness, may you find the wisdom and courage to continue to deepen into Love. To look into the old stories and choose to break the patterns and create new ones that elevate your consciousness and therefore that of the collective.

Much Love,

Sahar

P.s. If you are interested in working with me, please contact me at sahar@sustained360.com or check out sustained360.com to know more about my work and the vision for Sustained360 along with some workshops and programming. It would be a pleasure to support you on your journey.

Women Creative Entrepreneurs as Visionary Artists: Potential and Possibilities: re-writing our vision for a more just and inclusive world

What happens for a female entrepreneur is that she breaks free mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually from the Myths of the market that is just stories constructed by the male players within the context of patriarchy and White supremacy in a global capitalist world order, to define the rules of the game. The game of what? It isn’t even the game of moneymaking; it is about participating in social life. If you can imagine, there are literal bars, literal prisons and control systems in place, so intricately woven that you can’t even see the seams unless you have been bumped by it, shown it by another or some other way of knowing that through inquiry and investigation. Some of us know that we still have the strings attached to us, that is an attempt to forcefully silence us from our fullest expression, and from the truth about justice. It must be happening to someone, and when those someones speak, and take places where they talk about it, it is masked as smokescreen fog. Our brains are being fogged up by the games being mascaraed like it is the true reality of the state of our world. It isn’t. And it doesn’t have to be. There are human beings behind the leadership decisions and systematic structures of our world. People. We lack democracy.

It may be the ideal that we are sold into hegemonic consolidation of consensus, but it is not the truth about life that we live, here in the West or the East, because it truly is a global system. Are we truly fooled by the myths being created at this time about this group or that? Does that truly matter, we are placed in an emotional psychosis of constantly feeling fear, trauma and crisis, and when we are in those states we are out of our power, we are out of coherent resonance with the field of conscious clear thought. We lack the capacity to think “straight” or to see clearly, or to articulate our emotional world. Of course each household and member gets affected by this constant state of emergency that we have been living in, in the past however many years. For some it has been hundreds of years. When will the collective recovery begin?

When will creativity soar as the new way of being? Where we create alters of beauty everywhere, and we know that it is possible? That we can as a collective community live in Love because it feeds all of us. We desire truly when all is peaceful to be sharing beauty with eachother, to share laughter. We welcome grief, loss, betrayal despair, with medicine, tea, and community support. Not with the prison bars, and the law suits and court cases with dull wood. We live in a creative world, we can influence our systems and culture but we must be visionary leaders at the heart of it. And we must be creative visionary leaders ever more so.

By Sahar J

(c) 2015

Monologue Poetry on Language, schooling and Education

These are my magical students…ones whose gifts must be nurtured, but it must be brought out first. In our education system we have decided to skip that initiation, or transform it into a disciplinary tool, a segregation and re-perpetuation of inequities which have roots in injustice. I wonder, in the attempts of wrapping my brain or mind around this, and then my heart, and wonder is this the best thing possible? Are we truly having schools as places where the hearts and minds of children are loved, tended to, and explored by themselves and others. Are schools truly safe spaces for all children, or for any at all, if it is all for one and one for all? And we wonder about the impact of safe schooling, within the context of ghettos and gated communities. Ones where public and private funding and operations are in conversation with each other directly and yet in ways that are so distant. Finding one’s soul fire flame, their sense of hope, in this kind of an economy? I don’t really know what that means. To allow our true hearts and soul, our being be the one who is inquiring into her and his life and the in-between binary gender spectrum. Because you know, this language that I have acquired, comes with a culture, comes within a history, and has roots, somewhere. Ones that are not easy for any of us to stretch down to, but it continues to occur, not in a cliche way, but I guess that rap does get boring after a while, overwhelming and deprecating. I don’t have a commentary, my brain wants to block and shut down, trying to pour the emotional intelligence into the language structures of the same system that it is trying to connect to but from a “non-attachment” type of place, which just isn’t possible. But also not really palpable at other times.

However, I must say, Beauty does not live in separation from Pain, or from Suffering, Beauty is always at the root of the fabric, that is a source of attack. We all know and feel beauty, our hearts melt, we feel soft, intimate and vulnerable. Waking up each day, feeling a heavy feeling both of ecstatic joy, as well as deep sorrow for all those you have missed and how Love feels so sweet that you wish you could wrap every single being and particle of time and space with all of your heart, in all its expressions, possibilities and knowing, that you LOVE. And when we love we know we desire to be of service, to give the gift that is ours to give, since that is what brings us the most amount of joy. We have known love, mostly at the gateway of great sorrow, reaching its arms for you, to pull you out of despair. Yet it is there we connect and love it the most, even if it isn’t the most easiest thing to do. Especially after years of hardening up, and cutting our self off from our source, our place of beauty, and knowing that we are loved. And that changes everything outside of us and inside. People begin to forgive, they explore the pain and hurt inside and out and begin to grieve it, to honor it, and to allow the tears to be the thing that softens the heart and soul back to its ordinary ship, if there was ever such a thing. But the person begins to feel joy and connection again. A thing that brings panic in the hearts of those who have suffered deep trauma, violence, abuse. But those are never the only factors to expose. It becomes multi-faceted, with volumes of matrices of oppression, but I would say that word just feels a bit tasteless these days. I don’t really know what it means, because it creates a shared experience in all cases, but that takes away from the poetry of the stories themselves, and connected to larger stories. Weave. And I chose to become a storyteller, and a dream weaver. Much like the spider, daily taking time, to witness the threads I hold and am spinning, and what is it that I am weaving, and what it is that I desire to do with it? What is the purpose of this mission? The leadership coach asks. What has happened for me, are a variety of various seeds, that I planted consistently, and yes please call me a dreamer. It is my favorite past time, but in combination with daring action and risk, and determination. Determination in the unknown with faith and intention, passion and some guided direction.

I hide the fact that I am an artist behind the clothes of academic rigor. I wonder how they can come together into one. The various pieces in my life that I choose and desire to bring in. I don’t know how it happened, and it doesn’t feel like a unique story to me, yet I was compelled to write, to give birth to a form that could hold this story. So it could be shared with others, although there is a cliche thing or rather an archetypal notion of “writer” tends to block all of our minds, as the first thought, which is the way hegemony works. To have a dominant image be the place holder that is automatically recalled, when the word is said that symbolizes the image. This is the power of marketing and advertising, if you wanted to use the brain system as a form of manipulation. The phrase, “running through my mind”, or “stop trying to read my mind”, or “brain-wash”, or “mental colonization”…these are all referring to something. I found my interest in psychology somewhere along the way, but it turned out to not be Freudian, something about his works didn’t sit with me, and hasn’t been something I care to explore much. Call me biased, but at least I share the truth about how I feel.

Please share in the comment section if this has stirred up wisdom and thoughts from your own well of poetry! I am here in conversation!

xox
Sahar

Memory

Memory 

TO the souls of the young and old

Beauty Queens

This goes out to the hearts and spirits of men

As well.

Lest we forget

The memory of Love

Love not as a thing that is given by someone

But rather as a courage

As essence

Heart in the center

And truly is the medium

And gateway

Facilitator, receiver and sender

Of information through all pathways

From self to self

And self to others

And others to self

And all that is

Do you remember?

This important piece of information

That we were made with the cosmic stardust

Bursts of loving intention

Filling us up

Each cell

Imbued with this fragrance

Lest we not forget.

Lest we truly not forget.

It isn’t about remembering the wars

The way this world celebrates every November 11

This isn’t also about the collective traumatic retriggering

Of the conversations of 9/11

May we debug ourselves of these hateful memories

As the source of remembrance

And start to remember

That Love is truly at the center of all things.

Not the kind of love

That society teaches us

But the kind of Love

That truly lives in us

If we slow down enough

To allow it to speak

To allow it to spark

And fire us up from within

Love will take its heat

And light up the wick

Of your heart

So that you remember what it feels like

To be warmed up

From inside out

Illuminated

Sahar J (c) 2015

Choosing Love

 

I choose

I choose to no longer allow fear dictate the story of love

No outdated system of dating in my being anymore

I witness you dear one

I know you are afraid

I know you worry about the massive heartbreak

And even when you have said you trusted

You keep one foot forward and one foot back

That creates no movement

And leaves you feeling stagnated

In a sense of eternal crisis

Where you wish to move forward

Into a new adventure space

But feel like something is holding you back

I know

What can I do to sooth your soul?

What can I provide to re-mend your heart?

Do you have faith that it is possible to love again?

To trust again?

Can you hold the vision of your heart whole and healed?

Yes it is impacted,

But it has experience and stories to tell

But the stories are not who you are.

The stories don’t define your heart

They just live as an experience of it

You can set them free

With colourful bows and pretty wings

Love on them and see them

They just want to be seen

Without judgement and disgust

But with unwavering compassion and delight

I think the cracks in my heart are beautiful

I remember the stories that they hold

The wisdom and gentleness

And I choose to love wholeheartedly again.

I know this is a declaration

That requires commitment and not running away

And maybe I don’t know what this quest will be like

But I surrender and ask for help

Divine Love, I say YES

Will you take my hand and be my guide

And show me what dancing with Love feels like again?

Forgive me if I don’t know the proper steps

Or if I step on your toes

I admit I am a learner

Perhaps a beginner

But I am willing to choose

And say Yes.

 Sahar J (C) 2014

It is US: A call and tribute to the poets, artists and visionaries in service of Love and Justice at these times

This is dedicated to those who continue to have faith and act from their heart in service of Love and justice for they are inseparable, past, present and future. I thank you and stand with you, united in solidarity for peace, love, justice, harmony and co-creation on this Earth!

It is US.

The visionaries

the artists

the poets

the creative intellectuals

who will be doing the dreaming,

and construction of a new world. 

Through our imagination

and faith in Love,

birthing new possibilities 

through sacred union.

Allow the masculine and feminine

within and without 

to rise together

in service of Love.

To remind us

that we are inking

a new world through our pens,

painting new visions through our brushes.

These are not just petty actions 

or hopeless dreams.

We are marking the rememberance 

of soulful truths, 

deeper than the scars 

of the bullet wounds.

Our songs of peace must be sung 

even louder in these times

than the sounds of bullets and bombs

So that the wailing cries of mothers 

can be soothed with our voices, prayers and gifts.

Let’s hold out our arms

with our hearts wide open 

emanating Love to each other 

at this time

when racism or other forms of division

are used to create fear and hate

between each other.

We are wiser than that!

We remember our unity

We are poets, writers, artists

we are the drafters of new constitutions

lets amend the soul of the Earth

let’s remember the truth of our Self

Let’s truly put our faith in love

in Visionary possibilities

of a world that may not have yet happened,

but we have felt its rumblings deep within

and songs sung about it

since the birth of time.

Let us remember that Love

is a more powerful force

than fear.  

Pick up your tools of creation with me

and let’s begin doing the work necessary, 

to create more beauty. 

Let us use the energy of trauma

and transmute it 

through our intentions,

our prayers,

our thoughts,

and actions, 

for positive change.

One breathe

One thought

One stroke

One move

One dream 

One hug 

at a time. 

 

Sahar J  2014 (c)