Improbable. Incredible. Indomitable.

What do dancers, Burners, organic farmers, artists, healers, conscious parents and sacred activists all have in common?

1.) We choose to live life at the improbable edge of beauty and simplicity, giving our time, energy and attention, our blood, sweat and tears back to the earth, into our prayers, and in service to the continuity and interconnectivity of all of life. (We know that real abundance can be found not in more stuff or bigger bank accounts, but in awakeness, relationship and the physical structures that perpetuate and empower real health and ecological balance.)

2.)  We daily meet feeling and sensation, fatigue and elation, destruction and creation with incredible courage, self-awareness and persistent compassion, not because it’s easy, but because it’s the only thing that really makes sense or that makes us happy.  We like to be happy.  (We choose to show up instead of walking away.)

3.) We embody the indomitable intelligence of life itself, being and behaving as the water, going with the Way, engaging our energy to create more love, light and life, flowing as the coherency of soul-in-action.  (We turn off the death channels of addiction, dissociation, despondency, despair, apathy, anxiety, materialism and rage in favor of YES to the challenges, growth and grace of life.)

WE ARE THE ONES WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR.  We – the dancers, the farmers, the sacred activists, the parents, the artists, the incurable lovers of life – embody wise and fierce innocence, a chosen innocence we have won through the hard initiations of years.  We manifest the true spirit of creativity, vitality, radiance and learning-through-play as the art and practice of our lives.  We constantly re-blossom in the prayer for more life, more love, deeper into-me-see, more meaningful service, and a more elevated yet connected experience of being LIBERATED INTO LIFE.

Today, I bow to you.  I bow to the improbable, incredible, indomitable beauty that you mirror back to me.  I bow to the intensity of our creative fire, the magnificence of our passion, the trembling of our vulnerability, the disorientation of our ego dissolution, and the numinous emergence of ALL of our dreams.  You take my breath away.  You shatter me with your grace.  You startle me with wisdom and humility.  You mirror me to myself and remind me where my heart, body and soul are at home.  Without you, I could not fully be myself.

Thank you for who you are, who we are becoming, and who WE WILL BE as we continue to co-create the living architectures and ways of being that are the hope for the future of humanity.

Today, I say YES, MORE, PLEASE.  Yes.  Let us live, let us dance, let us create the improbable peace we continuously seek.  Let  us be simple, humble, beautiful and wise.  Let us be the the ones who cause a regenerative human presence on this earth

Today, I say thank you to you, for the seeds within you.  And, I invite you to plant them, to water them, and to bring them fully into fruit.  We need us.  We need you.

If you’ve been feeling small, insecure, insignificant, lost or out of control… ok.  Guess what?  We all feel that sometimes.  And, we all are that sometimes.  But, it’s just a temporary state.  It’s normal for anyone who is really living at the edge of mystery.  Just take a big, sighing breath and flush that feeling out of your system.  Let it go.  Take a new breath.  Remind yourself that you are living your life in relationship with something far larger than yourself.  You are living in alignment with life.  Life has your back.  Bring those less-than-awesome feelings into the dance and shake them loose.  In the perfect prayer you already have for yourself, you will soon make the next step, and the next.  You are improbable, incredible, indomitable…  we know who you are!

As Dostoyevsky said, “Beauty will save the world.”  What improbable, incredible, indomitable dream is latent and waiting to be birthed through you?

Make the prayer.

Do your dance.

Love,

Samantha

Ps… if that dream is all about DANCE, please join me in BALI, November 1-26 for the Dancing Freedom International Teacher Training and Soul Immersion – an initiation into movement as medicine that will launch you into the next expression of the dream of your life.

Enough: What Is Most Essential?

What is enough?

What is too much?

It is immensely tempting, in this age of racing time and systems-wide failure, to get caught in urgency, to try to fix everything. We are powerfully called to DO, to ACT, to “be the change”. We are called to engage social and spiritual action in every direction and dimension of our lives – from recycling, to gardening, to political action and citizen lobbying, to supporting schools, to fundraising for Haiti, Chile and the rainforests.  Indeed, all of these sectors and more need help, but in reaching out to all of it, can we be truly effective at giving back to the world what it most needs?

We are called to become integral spiritual beings, to map our inner worlds in totality, to hone our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual selves. Great idea. But, where is the ground? We measure ourselves against the achievements of activist giants like Paul Hawken or Lynn Twist, and we feel inadequate to the task at hand.  So, we become generalists. We become greatly skilled at navigating an integral playing field, but we become less connected to the specific dimensions of our own experience that inform the shape and tone of our greatest service.

In expanding to hold the ALL, the temptation is to take it ALL on. Isn’t this just another excess? If we make ourselves responsible for engaging the total system, working to change the whole by engaging all the parts, we loose track of the simple sufficiency of our unique gifts and inspirations. The shadow here is that nothing we do, nothing we give, nothing we are can actually be enough if we have to “do it all”. We end up recapitulating one of our deepest human wounds – the myth that “I am not enough.”

Yes, it is more than time to “be the change we want to see.” It is time to step up like never before. It is time to give. It is time to serve. It is time to fearlessly engage. But, isn’t it also time to step down, to relax into our humanity, to cease our seeking and finally, actually ARRIVE home to the simple grace, abundance and meaning inherent in our lives and relationships.

It is our “not enough-ness” that causes us, after all, to seek so ceaselessly to expand, be more, get more, do more. It motivates endless consumption loops and a reflexive grasping towards what we do not have. It is our not-enough-ness that causes us to place the value of the dollar above the value of our relationships, our moment to moment states of consciousness, and our connection with the earth and the animal worlds – things that are available to us all the time. It is part of the root sickness that generates the degenerative cycles of global capitalism and human addiction.

No human is designed to be everything. And this is a key point. As long as we are trying to do it all, we recapitulate the core wounds of inadequacy, self-loathing, jealousy, greed and insecurity that perpetuate our addictive behaviors, poverty and despair.

It seems to me that we need to restrain this impulse. Instead, we need to get specific, humble, anchored and real about what it is each of is specifically here to be and to do. We need to align our actions meaningfully with the SHINE of our SOULS, with our passion and our joy – in ways that are both powerful and calming. We need to root into the fundamental sufficiency of our hearts and spirits and our capacity to CHOOSE this enough-ness in every moment.  This is foundational for alignment within the greater harmonic of evolution happening at this time. No one of us can or is meant to do it all. Rather, we are here to co-cre-activate a personal, cultural and spiritual ecosystem of wholeness within which each of us is uniquely designed to fill a specific niche and play a specific role.

You are enough.

In and Beyond Time

Words Fall in oneness, through me.

Words fall on my side of the cosmic divide between this “one”
and “everything else.”

It is for me to hear through my soul channel,
As it is for you to hear through yours.

We are not alone in the hearing
Because the listening itself is a fabric,
a connective
act,
a verb that is a tissue,
a structure,
a promise
of gossamer connectivity between all things
In all time
In now.

I no longer forget.
I no longer remember.
I act or be
Be and act.

Noun into verb,
Verb into noun
All object.
All subject.

All subject to the rulership of divine harmony,
divine
chaos.
All in service to the sweet channel… of love.
And, in this, I have chosen.

I choose to dance the violet pentacle at the center of the flame,
At the center, where all hands grasp through the fire,

I choose a creativity
Which is uniquely peace.

I chose embodiment that is universally peace.

That is what is.
No more.
No less.
We are bowls of water.
Always full
Always empty.

Half and half is for beginners.
Take it all and leave it all.

And, still…
Don’t forget skillful maybe –
the open portal to what is beyond imagining.

But,
leave ambivalence at the door.

In this fierce storm of yes,
this sweet autumn of wind,
this quiet knowing of the path:

Begin in the Body.
Let it live.
Let it breath.
Let it feed.
Let it be soft, animal, instinctive and
Unavoidable.

Begin in the body, and connect.
This is where peace lives.
Peace becomes.
Peace acts, one gesture at a time.

Begin in the body.
Live in the heart.
This is not a choice.

This is a fact.
ACT from this fact.
And through this align in and beyond – space and time.

~ s.s.