Tag: feel it all

Feel It All: Burn It Down

Posted on by TheMuse

[one_third][/one_third][two_third_last]New, change, unfamiliar. These are things the season of Aries brings up. Katie Chirgotis of Eothen, our Muse of feeling and nature, shares some incandescent insights and images for this time of beginnings.

There are vibrant, essential places on our planet that require fire for vitality. The flats of the prairie, undulating grasslands of the savanna, and stands of chaparral and coniferous forests cannot thrive, or make room for renewal, without the heat and rapture of fire to sweep through. But what is initially left behind the flames’ retreat is most often a desolate reality. Fire catalyzes change that is so swift that often there is little comfort found in a blackened, smoldering moonscape – a strangeness that sparks fear, loneliness and grief.

Change. Harder for some, welcomed by others, inevitable to all. Coming into the start of our Zodiacal calendar, which truly feels like the New Year (truly – who can set intentions to hit the gym, or go on a juice cleanse, when we’re swaddled in sweaters and presented with anemic Romaine leaves in January?!), Aries fire is the match struck to New Beginnings. We can all feel the shift, and respond to it in turn by our actions and communication. Inboxes and text threads ping non-stop. Plans are made and projects launch. Heartbeats quicken, and hands turn over warming soil.

Realizations arrive with nuclear impact. Sledge-hammer decisions are made to chart a new course. Relationships come to an end, and we may be left in a barren moonscape where comfort was once found.[/two_third_last]

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[two_third]Both/and is the pyre of Aries, and its flames burn through old patterns and holdings to make room for something new. Further enlightened, stronger, present, in-tune. But different – and that’s where we trip up. To arrive at a place so strange and initially barren with grace is certainly not a concept I’m familiar with, and it’s one with which I feel many of us struggle. We may brace our heels and deny, or fight for whatever hold we have to keep things the same. But to struggle and resist change is to suffer. The pain, the burn! We associate with the sudden arrival to a place with which we are unfamiliar, and perhaps alone and afraid, is made greater when we do not allow ourselves to be swept along with the rush of spark and cinder.

To make room for more richness and vitality in our lives, both within ourselves and with one and another, must happen. Whether it’s something of our own choosing may not be our experience, but there is comfort in knowing that experience is a shared one, a necessary part of being here on this planet. And how lucky to be able to open our palms to the heat of change, warming us to something more.

Aries fire is both beautiful and terrible. Let us be thankful for both, and for the opportunity to begin again. [/two_third][one_third_last][/one_third_last]

Feel It All: Come Together

Posted on by TheMuse

[one_third][/one_third][two_third_last]The Deeply feeling Katie Chirgotis of Eothen entices us with some Aquarius Season sensing and a call to action of coming together, during this new age we find ourselves in; an age that is asking us to step out of the shadows of great revolutionaries to keep watch over the freedoms that have rightly been fought for and are our responsibilities to uphold.
Photography also by Katie (view her instagram here).

Perhaps you remember “20 Questions” played at a slumber party when you were young. There’s a range of asks: the name of a major crush to ketchup v mustard preference to a brush with a ghost. A question I remember was, “if you could live in any age, what decade would it be?” My answer, shushed out from behind a mangle of braces and bad bangs, “the 60’s!”

Several reasons:

Peace, Love and Rock n’ Roll.
Flower Power and all the daisy crowns that came with it.
Low-waist bell bottoms (back en vogue at the time).
Something about the way my body felt and my heart synced up when “Come Together” played on my parent’s Abbey Road album. A call, a thrum, a delicious idea of rebellion.[/two_third_last]

[two_third padding=”5% 0 0 0″]I was in love with the titillating juxtaposition of kumbaya anarchy, hand-holding, and peace-sign flashing. As a young person who so often felt alone and strange (along with almost every teenager that ever was), I imagined myself surrounded by others who felt and sang and danced like I did to the same Drum.

Decades later and more informed, I am sobered by the horrors of war and racial inequality that lit the flame of resistance. I recognize the cost of a generation disillusioned by and divided from the one before.

Generation( S ).

When we connected during Sagittarius season, we named that many of us haven’t needed to resist the current state of being. Rather, we distractedly stood on the shoulders of past radicals, artists, and truth-speakers who came together in protest of growing ugliness.[/two_third][one_third_last][/one_third_last]

[one_third][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”9% 0 0 0″]This Ugliness. Let’s sense into what reaction or feeling lights up in each of us. Division. Accusation. Acceptance. Disbelief. Hope. Doubt. Fear. Grief. Resolution. Revolution. Whatever the light may be, it is not just us alone. It glows within the person beside us, facing us, following us. As we turn to acknowledge the flame burning within each other’s heart, we see our Community.

In Aquarius embodiment, we are again gathering as Fire-keepers and High Idealists have done before. Creating tribes to support, keep watch, and act. Whether you have marched, called your Senator, or opened your heart/mind/mouth in kindness to connect with someone who feels differently than you, community is formed. Our former limits of time and space are rendered boundless by the seamless interplay of reality and virtual reality, (the use of the Internet/social media, by the way, is SO AQUARIAN). With no limits, we are drawn to one another. [/two_third_last]

[one_sixth][/one_sixth][one_third padding=”3% 0 0 0″]At the end of March, I am co-leading a gathering to hold space for this fire, and what we need to do to sustain it. For a few days, we’ll spend time in the wild nature of Big Sur, a place that I feel is incredibly close to Source. Through the practice of yoga, artistic creativity and spiritual healing – men and women will be a community that honors the need to feel safe AND free. Grounded AND in flight. An honoring of something bigger than ourselves, and longer than our brief time here on Earth.

I know you, you know me. So, let us beat the drums, gather around the fire, and see each other through the flames. [/one_third][one_third][/one_third][one_sixth_last][/one_sixth_last]

Feel It All: Where Are Your Bones?

Posted on by TheMuse

[one_third][/one_third][two_third_last padding=”5% 0 0 0″]Katie Chirgotis of Eothen joins us with her uber sensitive connection to the feeling realm and her poignant ability to identify our nurturing needs for the seasonal energies, through nature’s notes. Durning this exposed season of Capricorn, when mother earth gives us a peek at her own structuring methods (through bare branches and frosted windows), Katie points out how to take note and start connecting to our own framing. Words & Images by Katie

Have you ever stood in a room filled with chattering, shimmering people? All flashing eyes and teeth, emanated heat and magnetic poles pulse throughout the space? In that crash of sensory waves have you thought to yourself, “where am I?”

I’m not talking about where Google Maps pins you as the app runs in the background, or, on the opposite spectrum, your spiritual path to Enlightenment. I’m talking about your tangible, physical self–in this moment; in this crowd. On what do you stand? Where are your bones?[/two_third_last]

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[two_third padding=”3% 0 0 0″]So get in there. Close your eyes. Turn-on the x-ray vision. Witness your gorgeous skull balancing on the delicate vertebrae of neck, the fanning of collar and shoulders that square themselves above the fusion of ribs, a backwards wrap to the column of spine, diving into the bowl of hips, spinning on top of long trees of legs, pooling towards the roots of feet. This is your structure, this is how you stand. This is what carries your whirl of heady experience through the world. In some variation or another–it’s a similarity that we share. It houses a Self, and whether we’re in that crowded room or standing on some solitary stone on the Earth, we are all rattling here together.

We see the skeleton of many things this time of the year. The bare lines of trees and exposed raw ground, or the connective joinery that made up the past 365 days of who we were. In this seasonal sparseness, many begin building a structure for what’s to come. We may set intentions, saying them out loud to make them real, and to hold ourselves accountable. This is one of the few times where we collectively get humble about the notion of starting again. That perhaps this year we can be more present for ourselves and each other. We reconnect with our bones, the basal framing of who we are, to flesh out the hope for something more. [/two_third][one_third_last][/one_third_last]

Feel It All: How Are You Transitioning?

Posted on by TheMuse

[one_third][/one_third][two_third_last]New Contributor Katie Chirgotis brings an in-tune perspective to our community, a nature lover who works magic with flowers in the bay area through her company, Eothen. We wholeheartedly welcome and share her passionate voice and imagery as an empath, Millennial, artist and muse.

I often ask people how they are doing–not an exceptional way to start a conversation by any stretch. It’s something I genuinely want to know, no doubt. But the answer to the question also lays down the baseline for what I’m tuning into–whether I’m meeting someone for the first time or connecting with a friend from decades before. There’s plenty of lines to read between with the cheery response of, “Fine!”

Interestingly enough, what I have found, as we have all turned slowly into these longer nights and south-slanting light, is my lead-in question has changed. More and more I ask, “how are you transitioning?” It sounds a little strange coming out of my mouth, but there it is. What I have found even more interesting is that the response is often a level gaze, a thoughtful pause, and an articulation of change.

Leading into Sagittarius where big, blousy Jupiter takes us all up in large, fiery swaths of re-examination and questioning, and we have all experienced a different understanding of how we may think, feel, and move in comparison to those who stand beside us. But our experience of change, transitioning, and shifting are common denominators.[/two_third_last]

[one_half padding=”5% 0 0 0″]For many of us, particularly if you are a Millennial as I am, we have long been in cruise mode. The generations before fought wars, felt deeply about causes, shifted culture and, generally, believed in something. Because of that amount of work, or if you want to get woo-woo with me, transmitted energy, decisions were made and patterns set with no sustained volume of curiosity about it on our part. We were told the story, and we believed it to be true.

Now there’s a new frequency. From what I’m picking up, we are collectively waking up. Paying attention, stretching our muscles to ask why. And thank goodness! Doesn’t it feel so damn good to act? To see those patterns of your life, and decide that it doesn’t dictate who you are today, or the next? Perhaps now, there are things we must fight for rather than living within a lie.

So. How are you transitioning?[/one_half][one_half_last][/one_half_last]