002—Flowing and Blossoming

One of my favorite little gardens in my neighborhood, already so much blossoming.

My hands get warm and tingly whenever I receive Reiki and attend sound bowl meditations. I can feel a pulsating, swirling energy in my hands and a warmth that seems to come from out of nowhere, even when the rest of my body is cooled down. And I sometimes still feel this sensation later that evening when I’m about to fall asleep. I’m told this means I have a healing gift, and I understand that intuitively. I’ve had Reiki—an ancient Japanese energy healing technique—intermittently over the last 5-6 years or so. For nearly a year, I’ve been thinking about getting Reiki-certified myself. My current yoga studio (Synergy in Miami Beach <3) offers certification courses and the next one is in June. I think I’m going to do it!

Last week I went to Synergy’s monthly Reiki Healing Circle—a sound bowl meditation and mini Reiki sessions for a dozen or so people—and, as always, it was powerful. Every time, it quite literally moves me: the sound waves and the specifically tuned energy flowing through the water in me and the auric air around me, a reminder of how there is no separation with the world around you. Your atoms are connected to the air’s atoms are connected to the atoms of the people and animals and plants and objects around you. All matter is energy, vibrating at different rates or wavelengths—the atoms in solids, like a human body, are more tightly grouped together and so vibrate slower than atoms in liquids, and the atoms in liquids in turn vibrate slower than the atoms in gases. For me, these sound bowl meditations and reiki sessions are little reminders of oneness, opportunities for wavelengths to merge. :)

Last week was especially potent because of the hybrid total/annular eclipse. Chiara, one of the Reiki Masters guiding the reiki circle, suggested we focus our attention during this eclipse season on the Taoism concept of wu wei, or nonresistance, like flowing water, flowing with the path of least resistance. I started to think of this as how water can build up tightly where there’s a lot of resistance and pressure, like flooding or storms or raging rivers. Wound up, with little space for the H2O molecules to move freely, this mass of compacted water can cause a lot of destruction while trying to reduce the amount of energy it’s expending by staying all bunched up, being pressurized.

But water flowing naturally when and where there is little resistance, like a gentle stream moving towards a river moving towards an ocean, or flowing from a pitcher to a cup, or through cracks in ancient rock, it’s soft and gentle. It’s all about just letting things flow easily, not pushing or pulling, just allowing and observing. Not leaning into resistance but rather releasing into the flow. I understand this intellectually but don’t always feel it emotionally, spiritually, viscerally. This time I did. I released into the flow of the energy last week, which was intense because of the solar eclipse that Thursday, and came to a head on Friday. I felt like I could breathe fire. I felt unstoppable. I had so many ideas and so much creativity flowing. I had all this hyper, excited energy in me. I was at my desk editing photos and writing and bouncing around in my seat, so I stood up and shifted side to side before finally moving away from my desk, changing the music playing in my headphones from my brain.fm’s Creative Flow playlist to dancehall and classic salsa jams on Spotify, and dancing around my apartment in any which way, shaking out my limbs like those wacky inflatable tube people. And it felt good to release into that flow, not resisting it, getting it all out, depressurizing. I then went on a 4-mile walk on the beach to release the last of that pent-up energy I could physically feel coursing through me.

Last week’s hybrid solar eclipse was POTENT. This is me after dancing around my apartment and before a 4-mile walk to burn off the massive amount of energy I felt coursing through me.

Another concept I’ve been thinking about lately is something I read in Letters to a Starseed by Rebecca Campbell, which I just finished this week. I liked her first book a little better, Light is the New Black, which I read right before this one, but Letters was still a good read; some lovely nuggets sprinkled throughout. The concept of starseeds is pretty out there, I know, but when I first came across it via an unrelated interview-on-the-street video in my Instagram Explore page, I went down a rabbit hole researching everything I could about starseeds, my jaw dropping, and it all really resonated with me. I read a handful of books about starseeds and light workers and many articles online and watched YouTube videos on it. (Look it up if you’re interested. It may strike a chord in you, too.) In Letters, Campbell discusses, or rather reminds the reader, that flowers are not always in bloom. There are seasons for everything and every being. A gardenia isn’t always in bloom. It is not always strawberry season. And a butterfly is not always a butterfly; it has its cocoon and caterpillar stages, too.

Earlier this year, Michael, who is a Vedic Astrologer and friend of a friend, told me, “The last three years have been a little bit of an Ayahuasca trip for you,” he said with a chuckle. “Let’s assimilate. Review what you’ve learned over the last seven years or so, and let everything settle in. Absorb it.” I haven’t literally been on an Ayahuasca trip, but the stirring up of emotions and personal and spiritual awakening have been the same. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last several months, somewhat even before that conversation with Michael in early January. I left my corporate job in consulting late last summer and have dived right into some professional projects in my next chapter, and paused to look back on other aspects of my life, trying to be more intentional about things (e.g., dating, relationships, life partnership, men).

To help me assimilate, I went through thousands of photos in my phone’s Camera Roll since 2016, and went through journals and notes, reflecting on all that I did, saw, experienced and felt in the past seven years. It was a lot—travel, romantic relationships and dating and heartbreak, new friendships and adjusted friendships, job changes, family and friends starting their own families. So I’ve been in a cocoon phase over the last few months especially and really feel like I’m moving into a new butterfly blossoming stage with these eclipses. There are typically two eclipse seasons in a year. This springtime eclipse season began with a solar eclipse on April 20 at 12:12am EST and will close with a lunar eclipse on May 5 at 1:33pm EST (eclipses happen in pairs, coinciding with the new and full moon phases). I’ve been assimilating, reflecting, cocooning, preparing for my blossoming, and it all feels very imminent, happening.

Apart from these ruminations on wu wei, blossoming, and the intensity of this springtime eclipse season, this last week I went to a little pizza party at my grandma’s house. My goddaughter Ava (my cousin Stephany’s daughter) played with her grandma’s (my aunt Fanny’s) bunny. And Easton, Ava’s baby brother, super-streamed his mom right before she bathed him in my grandma’s sink. All of us in her bedroom—me, my grandma Nonita, my cousins Stephany, Emma, and Elise, my aunts Fanny and Angie, and Ava and Easton—laughed hysterically amidst the chaos. There’s a lot of women in family! I went to Jazzmin’s (my brother’s girlfriend’s) graduation party, also filled with so much love and yummy food, including a delicious, massive arroz con pollo made in a pan that was nearly half my size. The next day I had a baptism photo gig for baby Ruby, with her cutesy blonde curls and the prettiest green eyes you’ve ever seen. Later in the week I stayed up until 4am learning Instagram Reels and making my first two reels (of Paris stills) until I thought my eyes would pop out of my head and my hand would cramp up into an immovable claw (yet still found it fun to make these little videos and watch it all come together, a mini movie of ~feels~). &&&& I relished the overwhelming love and support I received near and far in launching this newsletter this week. <3 ♾️

Random snaps from throughout my week. Counter-clockwise from top-left: Me, carrying baby Easton, my cousin Stephany's son, as he holds and shakes my grandma's hand with this little fingers; Ava playing and giving cuddles to her baby brother Easton; Ava playing with her grandma's bunny; me and Jazzmin, my brother's girlfriend at her graduation party, with the cutest decorated cake and (next photo) a massive delicious arroz con pollo; a horse and carriage awaiting newlyweds outside a church near my parents' house; a very cool water bottle my dad got me where I can add stickers of all the National Parks I've been to(!); my notebook for writing morning pages and daily affirmations; the sky above my neighborhood this day looked so cool this day, like a blanket of pillowy cotton.

This week I’ve been:

Reading: Letters to a Starseed by Rebecca Campbell (finished this) and got back into Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway. And I’m proud of myself for keeping up with my daily newsletters from: The New York Times, Associated Press, The Daily Skimm, Reuters, The Conversation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Paris Review Poetry and Poets.org’s Poem-a-Day (my toxic trait is signing up for too many newsletters). I also read an Outside Magazine article, Tiffany Duong Refuses to Disappoint Herself, about an unhappy corporate lawyer who quits her career to become a happy marine explorer. I cried at the line, “One of the things that has helped me the most in this journey is realizing I’d rather disappoint everyone else than disappoint myself.”

Writing: I write my daily morning pages (see: Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for an absolute gamechanger): journaling three pages longhand as soon as I wake up in the morning. It helps with brain-dumping my racing thoughts and things on my mental to-do list, plus with remembering my many vivid, detailed, complex dreams. I dream a lot and typically remember them but writing them down consistently has helped me notice patterns and symbols that my subconscious and/or higher consciousness uses to send me messages. Today was Day 50 of morning pages, woohoo! I’m trying to keep up with the writing prompts on Rachel Jepsen’s Practice, Process, Craft newsletter. I did one the other day (may post it here soon!), with a slight twist: I picked out a sound (or could be any sense) I could hear and followed that imaginatively as far as I could for 30 minutes, writing whatever came to mind. I chose the wind and observed the wind. To be honest, I tend to notice the wind a lot anyways, but for that exercise, observing the wind on my long walk to the beach and to yoga, I took special note of all the ways it melded and molded with physical objects in its wake.

Photographing/Photo Editing: I photographed little baby Ruby’s baptism and I finished editing my cousin Isabella’s cap and gown college (!) graduation photos I took a couple weeks ago. I cannot believe she is graduating college and about to turn 21 in a couple weeks. I was in seventh grade when she was born, a school year that started with the twin towers still standing and ended with the birth of the first of my cousins to be born in a post-9/11 world, ushering in a totally new generation.

A black and white film photo I took and developed of my cousin Isabella at age 4 or 5, ca. 2006/2007.

My cousin Isabella, now 20 about to turn 21, and about to graduate from college (!) during the cap and gown photos I took of her around her college campus.

Listening to: Playlists on my brain.fm app, as well as indigenous flute music, Mahalia Jackson, Skinny Pelembe, Mdou Moctar, and Ram Dass x East Forest on Spotify.

Watching: @explorationvisuals on YouTube. His videos remind me of when me and my friend Megan would watch episodes of Big Brother after nights out in college and we’d just be sitting there watching a random guy eat cereal at 2am. (Only these now have beautiful footage of the nature and the outdoors LOL.) There’s something calming about watching someone eat cereal or make coffee and soak in their day in a completely different part of the world. So wholesome. So authentic. I love it. Megan and I would also follow along one of her study abroad friends who was road tripping from DC to Colorado and he’d post the videos to Facebook. It was my introduction to watching similar-type videos now on YouTube. You can find absolutely anything on YouTube. But these day-in-the-life videos always get me. <3 ♾️

Here’s a photo of Wilma, just because, from when I stayed at my parents’ house the other day.

xo,

Jessica