It surprised me that I felt so much in this part of my body. Aragonite is known to be a very grounding and stabilizing root chakra stone, so I was confused at first.
Then it hit me…when the root chakra is healthy (or moving toward a state of health)…when you feel safe and secure and grounded in the here and now, your heart is able to open up. To have a "heartsplosion" so to speak.
It surprised me that I felt so much in this part of my body. Aragonite is known to be a very grounding and stabilizing root chakra stone, so I was confused at first.
Then it hit me…when the root chakra is healthy (or moving toward a state of health)…when you feel safe and secure and grounded in the here and now, your heart is able to open up. To have a "heartsplosion" so to speak.
The need to find safety in my body in order to connect to my heart has been my experience and it's what I’m currently working the most on at this point in my journey. Without that sense of safety in the body my heart closes and acts as a sort of valve that keeps all my creativity and life force energy dammed up inside.
It feels like shit and is pretty exhausting tbh. It also doesn't allow me to do the thing that I love the most which is to create from my heart and connect with other people through my creations.
Developmental trauma does that to you. It teaches the body to close up and shut down in order to stay safe. It’s brilliant of the body to do this and necessary when you’re small and unable to care for yourself, but to live fully this needs to shift.
One of the saddest parts of developing within a traumatic system, whatever that system may be, is that you end up walking around for decades not realizing that you’re shut down. Shut down feels normal. It feels right. It feels safe.
I have been actively working to cultivate safety within my body for over a decade now. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing when I started. I thought I was just getting sober, doing step work and seeing a therapist.
Now, almost 13 years later, having developed the capacity to accept safety and support from others, it is growing more and more within me. The unexpected benefit is that as a sense of safety grows in my body, my heart is opening and my creativity and life force energy are moving more freely. It goes in fits and starts, but it’s moving in the direction that feels right.
This insight about the relationship between my opening heart and the safety and stability that I've been cultivating would have been missed, though, if I'd stuck to what I learned about Aragonite through crystal books. You see, the most important thing (from my perspective) when working with crystals and minerals is to use the info you find about them in books or online as a loose guideline.
If you get to caught up in the “rules” associated with them you run the risk of falling into dogma and the world sure as hell doesn’t need any more dogma! Hold the info you find about them loosely and use it as a starting point.
Let them be the teachers and guides they are, but always follow your gut. The same goes for any system you work. Anything can point you toward the true source of the answers you’re seeking, because you always have that true source within. You just have to allow it to emerge and allowing takes time. It can’t be forced.
You may feel like this couldn’t be true for you but that’s just your brilliant self trying to keep you safe the only way it knows how.
You are ready for an upgrade.
The answers ARE within. You may not realize it, though, because they were tucked away for safe keeping. Once you’re ready, you’ll find them. The most important thing with crystals, or any systems that are meant to help you grow, is to let them speak to you in whatever way they want to.
When you do that you WILL hear exactly what is meant for you. It may be faint at first and you may have a hard time recognizing it, but with practice it will develop. One day you may even find yourself having a "heartsplosion" when you least expect it!
There's no getting around it...life seems to come with duality, even if we've touched the unspeakable vastness of non-duality. Refusing to allow the hard stuff completely cuts off at least half of our emotional and spiritual lives. I've felt and experienced Oneness. I've lived for months in that space of knowing that I, and everyone else, is One and pure Love in the highest sense of the words. I've been there and I've come back from there. I've mourned the loss of that incomprehensibly peaceful and secure state. I've desperately sought to get it back. I've inadvertently refused to acknowledge that if I am here, I must be meant to be experiencing all of it, but I'm learning that there is space for all of it within me. That there is actually not just space to allow it all, but even space to celebrate it all. There is space to go straight into the heart of the deepest pain and darkest fears.
I’m letting feelings be as much as I can now. I’m letting them show up announced and uninvited without slamming the door of my heart shut on them and forcing them back into the deep. That slight dull tightness in my chest...it actually may be worth exploring. It’s hard. Like insanely hard. It brings all the disallowed feelings that I learned as a tiny vulnerable body with an open and sensitive nervous system were dangerous. That to survive and function the way I was taught I needed to function, those feelings had to be pushed away.
It’s terrifying and paralyzing and exhausting to go against a lifetime of neural pathways. As I practice allowing it all, I feel like life is constantly on the verge of falling apart. I don’t know how to keep getting things done and allow myself to feel at the same time. And lets face it, things have to get done. I have three kids who need a roof over their heads, food to eat and nurturing from their mom. I lay in bed and let the waves overtake me. It’s all I can do sometimes. At times my body suddenly aches deeply as if from a flu and just as quickly the pain disappears. It feels intolerable at times, but I want to let the feelings and experiences be and give them room to show me what they actually are, not what I was taught either explicitly or implicitly that they were. So, I am simply doing my best to allow the terror, the rage, the hate, all of it to have a soft place to land.
Please don’t misunderstand what I'm sharing. This is a good thing. It really is. I don’t often talk about this because I don’t want to hear anyone tell me what to do to feel better, or tell me that I need to feel better at all. That’s the point of this...This is NOT about feeling better. Trying to feel better in even the most subtle ways is more often than not a rejection of parts of myself and it is not necessary. Its such a deeply ingrained habit of survival. But, man, the blackness and burning that grips my gut and heart sure makes me want to switch off all feeling. And many times I do switch it off. I don’t even notice I do it. It just happens and I may see it in hindsight. I share this because I feel called to in the moment. I share because in my darkest times I have been held by the words of a seeming stranger who had been there before and maybe I can be there for someone else, and being there for them I'm coming full circle...showing up for myself and refusing to continue the unnecessary cycle of self-abandonment.
Sometimes choosing fear is choosing love. It's not the well behaved, good feeling, high vibe, align with all the abundance you’ve ever dreamed of kinda love I’m talking about. That love is a myth. A myth created by a terrified mind that decided that in order to be okay all the bad had to be buried as deep and far away as possible.
Love, in the way I’m coming to know and embrace it, is an open space. A container that allows everything to be exactly as it is. And, I mean EVERYTHING The unacceptable and disallowed just want a place to land. They want to sit down without being shooed away and told how to be. Love welcomes the uninvited, the messy, the homeless and weary parts of ourselves. It makes a bed and sets out clean towels and warms a meal in the oven. It welcomes ALL with the finest of grace, yet is perfectly content to allow those gestures to be accepted or ignored, and THAT is where the kindness and compassion lies. Not, in offering the food or hot bath, but in allowing the shattered parts of ourselves the dignity of choosing whether to take them or not and the space to heal in their own time held in the warmth of radical, uncompromising acceptance.
How many of us hold back in our lives because of fears that others have passed on to us. Fears that were intended to keep us safe, but are ultimately unfounded and unnecessary and only act to clip our wings.
]]>How many of us hold back in our lives because of fears that others have passed on to us. Fears that were intended to keep us safe, but are ultimately unfounded and unnecessary and only act to clip our wings.
My “Icarus Soaring” collection was conceived of and crafted during the weeks and days leading up to the Summer Solstice. It celebrates the solstice by encouraging you to question your beliefs and the answers you think you already have. This collection asks you to find your personal truth so that you can live your life on your terms and not be ruled by collective fears and ancestral patterns that are ready to be released.
The myth of Icarus and Daedalus is one that you may or may not know the details of, but most people are aware of its basic message. If you aren’t familiar, and even if you are, here’s a refresher:
In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a master craftsman and inventor. At King Minos’s request, he designed the infamous maze known as the Labyrinth on the island of Crete in order to contain the Minotaur. As happens in many Greek myths, what started out as a good relationship eventually falls apart and King Minos ends up locking Daedalus and his son Icarus in the Labyrinth. Daedalus realizing that the only way to escape is by air, designs and builds sets of wings for both himself and Icarus. He makes them out of feathers, wax and twine and warns Icarus that he needs to fly evenly between the sea and the sky. If he flies too low the mists from the sea will dampen the wings and make it impossible to fly. If he flies too high the heat from the sun will melt the wax and they’ll fall apart. The two men take off and begin their flight, Daedalus encouraging Icarus, but continually warning him to be careful. In Icarus’s excitement that he is flying, he forgets his father’s warnings and flies higher and higher. The wax on his wings begins to melt, they fall apart and he plunges to his death in the sea below.
Throughout history, this story has served as a stark warning to be careful to stay in the middle and avoid extremes. It has been one of the many cultural messages, born of a desire for safety for ourselves and those we love, that has clipped our collective and individual wings and is ready to be looked at, questioned and possibly let go.
Most of us have lived as if staying in the middle and not being too daring or bold will somehow guarantee our safety. At the same time, we’ve either admired and glorified or feared and demonized those who‘ve dared to think and live outside of our collectively constructed box. But guess what??? Safety doesn’t come from holding back and ignoring your dreams. It doesn’t come from following someone else’s reality no matter how well intentioned they were in passing that reality on to you. A deep sense of safety and security can ONLY be found within. Trust me on this one! I spent way longer than I care to admit using anything and everything outside of myself to find this peace.
There really is a voice of intuition that is speaking directly to you and guiding you along your individual path and it’s yours alone. You can’t take someone else’s beliefs and live by them blindly. Safety and security does not come from toeing the line that was drawn by someone else. You actually get to find your own line if you want. By finding and listening to our inner voice, we learn in our own way and our own time to align with our Source, the Divine, God, whatever you want to call it. The focusing of this uncontainable and unfathomable thing that is Life and Creation itself into a finite, masculine entity known collectively and culturally as “God” is yet another topic that I have dug deeply into as I’ve grown and will share with you all at some point, but for now, just know that there is something so much bigger than we could ever even remotely fathom going on.
Back to the story of Daedalus and Icarus…What greater representation of thinking big can there be than crafting wings for yourself and your child to conquer the seemingly impossible task of flight. I think of flight in this story as both the innate desire that we all have to “reach the divine”, and this search being directed outside of ourselves rather than within. In order to form a relationship with this power greater than ourselves we have to think beyond our previously held constraints and question the beliefs that have been passed down to us at the most fundamental levels.
To Daedalus, crafting the wings and taking flight was meant to simply escape the Labyrinth…a prison that Daedalus himself had constructed for a different purpose, but which ultimately enslaved both him and his son. He sought to save them, but only by changing the situation and not the patterns that underpinned it. Icarus wanted to soar above his father’s perceived limitations and live his own way. Icarus dared to soar higher and dream bigger, but Daedalus urged his son to stay in the middle, and THIS is what actually led to his fall.
You see, the last piece of this story that is very important, but easy to overlook is that what Daedalus warned Icarus of was actually an impossibility. Flying higher and apparently closer to the sun was not going to make it more likely that the wax would melt. This well-intentioned warning of a father to a son is one of the most well known, but unacknowledged examples of how we perpetuate our misperceptions from one generation to the next. Icarus dreamed of something else, but the seed of fear that was planted within him took root and was what ultimately led to his fall. Not his flying higher.
We dream of our creations, whatever they may be, becoming free and living on their own out in the world. At the same time, we often pass things on to others that unintentionally clip their wings. Or, on the flip side, we don’t take responsibility for our own mindset by questioning our beliefs and the answers we think we have. Reframing this famous myth and thinking about it in this way is a step in another direction that can give the Icarus within all of us the chance to rewrite our beliefs so we can finally soar.
]]>I’ve experienced many things in my life…especially in the past decade. It’s been a roller coaster of emotions and experiences as I’ve navigated recovery, divorce and learning to be on my own and self-sufficient. Through this period of intense growth and learning, my life has become a perpetual practice of looking within and peeling the proverbial onion.
I came into adulthood with my only coping skill being to try anything and everything to change my outer circumstances in an attempt to address what could only be dealt with by looking within. That didn’t work out so well and it backed me into a corner where I could choose to either really look within or lose everything.
Faced with that choice, one tends to get serious about their growth. Fast forward nine years and, I now live life completely differently. I used to have absolutely no clue what was going on inside of me. I was so numb that I didn’t even know when I was feeling something, let alone WHAT I was feeling.
Today, I have a few tools and I try my best to use every encounter, circumstance and thought I have as a sacred reflection of my inner world. A world that was once completely outside of my awareness. It is still pretty beyond me much of the time, but now I feel like I have a flashlight to show me at least part of my inner landscape.
Living this way has led to some intense pain. There have been times when I’ve had emotional and spiritual crises that have coincided with very important projects and events. Crises that in the past would have been handled by fleeing in any way, shape or form that I could. But, this always happened with the "big stuff". The commitments that I knew I both wanted and needed to follow through on. During these crises, I had to find a way to feel what was showing up and not run.
So, back to the good vibes…It used to confuse me when people would tell me they felt such good vibes from my work. I mean...I got it, but at the same time some of the work that they were getting the feels from were ones that my tears were literally falling on as I crafted them in the previous weeks. There have been many times that I was an absolute wreck in the days and weeks leading up to markets. Times when I could barely get out of bed because I was so gripped with terror or paralyzed from processing my earliest experiences that had been buried for decades.
I always thanked people for their kind words and felt deep gratitude but I would be perplexed. Until one day it finally occurred to me that what they were feeling as “good vibes” or “love” was actually the honesty and presence that I was bringing to my life. At some point in my growth process, I had made a shift to actually sitting with whatever came up in me and doing my best to just let it be without telling it that it needed to be different. I learned to trust that it would pass when it was time, but that it was vitally important to just sit with some things. THIS was what was being felt by people when they encountered my work. People are touched by honesty and presence deep inside in a way that they most easily know how to interpret as “good vibes” in our modern day jargon.
I love to feel good. I love good vibes. I think it’s amazing that more and more people are living in an intentional and conscious way in order to foster more love and positivity in their lives. At times, though, with so much focus on feeling good and the plethora of beautiful spiritual memes out there (yes, I've created my share), it can risk feeling a bit overdone and surface-y.
For me, good vibes can NEVER be at the expense of allowing and being with what is showing up right here, right now. Sometimes that’s an amazing connection I make with someone through my jewelry, sometimes it’s sitting with and feeling the terror of past trauma that has been coaxed from its familiar hiding spot in my body, and sometimes it’s simply cleaning up spilled food that one of my kids has neglected to notice they left all over the kitchen counter. This honesty and willingness, this opening to the allowing of “all vibes”…feeling what I’m feeling in each and every moment…THIS is what people feel in my jewelry. THIS is what leads to “good vibes”.
The willingness to just be with “what is” right here, right now is what I ultimately hope people are inspired to experience in their own lives and in their own ways. If my art allows me to fully share this most sacred of moments with a fellow human being, then I am truly sharing my “good vibes” with the world in a way that feels very good to me, too.
]]>We each have such unique stories that I could never presume to know what anyone else may need at any point in time. All I can do is make my self available to be truly helpful to others, share my experiences from my heart and trust that moving through this life in a way that feels right and loving to me in each moment will touch others whether they (or I) realize it or not.
Over the past year, I've found myself creating chakra designs for no other reason than that it feels right inside my body. On my path, I have gone through many phases of releasing all kinds of thoughts, beliefs and patterns, from the obviously limiting and negative ones, to ones that I had considered normal and useful. It has been a very messy, yet beautiful process.
Creating chakra inspired designs with raw minerals reflects this balance and play of beauty and pain that is always experienced by those on paths that require growth to move forward. While, I am fascinated with the chakra system and pretty much anything considered spiritual or metaphysical, I don’t recommend or advocate any specific healing modalities or spiritual paths.
My personal journey has led me to some pretty profound places. I’ve had amazing insights and experiences of oneness, spaciousness and connection. But at the end of the day, these are all experiences and what I feel pulled toward…what we all are pulled toward in one way or another...is the quiet center of peace and unconditional love that we are. Not that we possess, but that we actually ARE.
This looks different to everyone since we all have such varied stories, and I believe that we each have our own innate strength, wisdom and capacity to find balance. Learning to tap into these inner reserves may or may not produce healing results and my own experience has shown me that any long term healing is always secondary to this reconnection with the self.
I don’t talk or write a lot about the various chakras and all their properties and which stones are right for what. I prefer to allow people to research this information on their own if they're interested and find what works for them. It's all about learning to trust your own wisdom and journey.
How do I use minerals and my jewelry in my daily life? Different stones call to me on different days and I often have no idea why. It may be their color or the energy I feel from them or even the way they caught my eye when I least expected it. I’m not sure why I am drawn to what I’m drawn to each day. I just know that somedays I feel drawn to specific pieces of jewelry or crystals and so I wear them, meditate with them or simply work on my computer with them close by.
I feel this message in different parts of my body and in different ways. Sometimes it’s a feeling of lightness and an open expansion in my chest. Sometimes it’s a calming and cooling in the back of my throat. I even regularly feel a sensation in my palms as if air is moving through them and emanating from them at the same time. I feel it in different places, but have come to recognize a certain quality to the feel of the energy and know that this means it’s time to listen. I try not to over analyze or make it a head thing. My head often wants to get in on the game and control this magical realm of intuition, but it is uncontrollable and its voice becomes muffled when I get too up in my head.
I invite you to welcome your own natural intuition to show itself to you more and more every day. My sincere hope with my jewelry is that it reminds you of who you truly are and encourages you to connect with your inner teacher and the strength and abilities that you already possess. Any healing or growth ultimately comes from inside and I feel honored when my work meets someone at exactly the right time on their path and encourages them to keep going.
Make sure to check out my every growing collection of chakra inspired designs!
]]>This New Moon in Taurus to Full Flower Moon Collection is all about moving from a fear based way of thinking and living to a love based way. I have been drawn for over a decade to the guidance and the firm, but loving hand of A Course in Miracles. One of the main messages of the Course can be summed up by an excerpt from the main text, which says "Your task is not to seek for Love but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
My purpose and intention with this collection is to bring attention to this mindset and the deeply ingrained foundation of fear, not just in my life, but in all of humanity in order to bring it to the light to be transformed in whatever way is meant to serve my highest good and the collective highest good. This collection, as well as my process of bringing it to life, is representative of my conscious decision and moment by moment choice to move from fear to love. My intention is that it touches those who are meant to experience its loving energy and message, whether that's through actually purchasing a piece from the collection or simply reading these words and/or making the conscious choice to look within to find your own blocks to love and its full expression in your day to day life.
The Flower Moon Collection features smoky quartz, rose quartz, druzy ranging from dark black to blush pink, angel aura, rainbow moonstone, feathers and copper. Each mineral was chosen during the time of the New Moon in Taurus earlier this month when I felt strongly guided toward the energy I felt from them. I spent sacred time with them, cleansed them with palo santo and performed a very personal and intuitive ceremony under the new moon. My intention during this time has been to release old patterns of fear and limitation and move boldly forward living fully from my heart and allowing the love and deep gratitude that is always present to radiate from me.
Each piece in the collection was infused with the collective energy that surrounded their conception and creation. Since each piece was conceived of and created together, the various pieces share each others energies, even if they don't share the same materials. They are the embodiment of my going deep into and letting go of my own personal and ancestral patterns of fear and representative of this collective movement in humanity as well.
Smoky quartz is incredibly grounding and transmutes the negative to positive. It is all about new beginnings and manifestation and combining it with rose quartz is meant to ground us in love and the heart. It is associated with the root chakra, which is all about survival, and is intended to help us move from focusing on surviving based in fear to thriving based in love.
The gentle and soothing energy of rose quartz helps with this. It has a feminine, maternal energy that guides us on our path to healing emotional wounds and reconnecting to our heart center; think Mother Earth holding you in love and gently teaching you that it is safe to live from your heart.
Angel aura can help us see the beauty that always surrounds us and the beauty between us inter personally. It is helpful for bringing hope, joy and optimism to our creativity, replacing fear and worry with loving vibrations.
Rainbow moonstone represents and embodies the divine feminine and maternal universal energy and is strongly associated with the full moon. She feels like a guiding figure that is with you at all times providing strong love and support in any endeavor where you're moving into new and unknown territory. On this path of moving from fear to love, she holds us in her divine and nurturing energy.
The various shades of druzy represent and hold the energy of the moon moving from the dark, new phase to the bright, full moon. Druzy supports us in going deep within the dark parts of ourselves where we will always find the inner light of love, no matter how dark the way seems.
The feathers represent the guidance that is all around us. It may be from loved ones and ancestors who have moved on from this life or it may be the universal loving guidance that is in everything. You may feel strongly one way or another or you may not. The point is that they represent that it is safe to trust that loving guidance and support is all around ready to help you move to new heights in your life.
Finally, copper is a very good conductor and believed to enhance the properties of any materials it is paired with. Please know that the information that I give here is not to be considered medical or professional psychological advice or counseling. I strongly believe in taking 100% responsibility for our experiences and lives and using any information, such as what I'm providing, to inspire us to look within and access the strength and power that we already have, but may have covered up or forgotten. Please take what you feel is for you and leave the rest. My work and words are open to be experienced and interpreted in whatever way feels right for those who come across it.
Thank you so much for taking this journey with me from the new moon to the full moon, for having the desire to find a better way, the courage to look within and the strength to go where you are guided to go and look where you are guided to look. I am so grateful to be able to create these pieces as a visual testament to and representation of my ongoing commitment to looking directly at the blocks of fear that I have built in my life and making the choice to remember love instead.
Thank you and with deep love and gratitude I release this collection for the highest good of all! Enjoy!
From my heart to yours,
Amy
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