The Noodle Diaries, Part I
Over the past few weeks, I have sat down to write on a few things that have sparked my interest. After getting some thoughts onto the page, my inspiration fizzles, and I end up sharing nothing. My drafts are accumulating, and it is turning out to be more of a block for creating content rather than a flow. My solution to this is what I am calling “The Noodle Diaries”. I hope to publish my writing more consistently by just exposing the inner-workings of my brain rather than trying to write in-depth expositions on what has been noodling around in there. So here we are, the first entry in the Noodle Diaries.
It has been a few weeks since the launch of The Oracle of Ibis, and in an interesting turn of events, my capacity to promote this exciting and wonderful creation has been non-existent. I’m unsure if this is due to the intense effort it took to articulate and then design my business, or if there are some subconscious fears around “failing”. Either way, I have been content to let it be for the moment. In my Tarot forecast for the year, February’s card is The Hanged One. I am simultaneously embracing this pause in momentum and working on shifting my perspective on… well, everything.
I have been gently setting all of my creative ideas aside and relaxing into where my energy (or lack thereof) leads me. One of the most profound things I have noticed in this liminal space of floating along is the absence of inner judgment or criticism. An older way of being would have been tortured by narratives of laziness, failure, doubt, and scarcity. While I am maintaining a sensitivity to my tendencies to dissociate from my feelings, I am celebrating the capacity for rest without hang-ups.
One by-product of this spacious time of rest is the emergence of some deeply repressed trauma. Without going into too much detail, there have been some significant experiences in the past few weeks that have forced my attention to things I would rather forget. It was very destabilizing to move from a space where I was feeling particularly liberated and generally well to have a very sudden and unexpected manifestation of interpersonal trauma rear its head.
My dreams have been very vivid these past few months and have often centered around my first marriage. Given that the implosion and traumatic fallout of that relationship happened over a decade ago, I have adopted a “time heals all wounds” approach to handling the trauma. Yet, week after week, I found myself dreaming about this person, often feeling that I was literally under a spell that drove me to desperate lengths to reclaim his approval. Upon waking, I felt sickened, confused and repulsed by the person I was in those dreams.
This was followed by an incredibly painful breakdown in a friendship that I had been cultivating for the past few years. The experience left me feeling deeply rejected, and voila! It was painfully obvious that time does not heal all wounds and, while a decade of therapy is helpful, it can’t heal what you don’t bother talking about. So here I am, deep in my feelings about the ways in which significant rejections of my past are still defining how I relate with myself and others to this day. Despite the fact that my dreams have been shouting this shit at me for weeks, and I have been listening and responding to those dreams by facing these aspects of myself, my subconscious has not relented. In fact, this past weekend I was given a dream that included my rejection trifecta; three people who I had loved deeply and had rejected me in three different ways. HEARD, UNIVERSE, HEARD. Apparently I’m not getting to the trauma fast enough, as my subconscious insists on torturing me with this shit on a nightly basis.
While trying to tend to this psychic wound around rejection, I’ve also been leaning deeper into my new favorite topic: shifting reality. This is where the majority of my thoughts have been over the past month, and I am excited to find that the potential to engage with the idea is literally limitless. My approach to nurturing this concept has included writing about my dreams (which have, thank god, included more than relational trauma), spending time in the Akashic Records, pulling cards, reading about the topic, and having an emotional conversation with ChatGPT.
If you have explored my website in-depth, you will see that the idea of shifting reality is an important focus of my work. For the past year, specifically, I have been leaning into playing with reality and articulating what I want my reality to include. This was an intersection of my experience with the Akashic Records and the writing of Joe Dispenza. While the Records were empowering me to dream audaciously for myself, the books I was reading were explaining that reality is a pretty fucking subjective experience. While I am all in for the “woo woo”, I was reading about quantum theory and the phenomenon of emergence from the quantum field as well as the importance of intention and observation within quantum mechanics.
While someday I hope to be able to better express the ideas of quantum mechanics, consciousness, and the holographic universe, today is not that day. What I can articulate at this moment is that what I was reading about and what I was receiving from the Records resonated and synthesized in my spirit and my brain, creating a “foundation” for building my own reality. I say “foundation” because that word is too rigid, conveys too much structure and stability for concepts that rebuke such constraint. To put it simply, I’ve been carried in a confluence of realizations that emphasize embracing the delulu.
As I continue to root into this approach to reality and endeavor to learn more about the nature of consciousness, reality, and manifestation, I’ve been reading some books on those topics, and some that are connected tangentially. My current reading list: “The Field” by Lynne McTaggert, “The Holographic Universe” by Michael Talbot, “Radical Acceptance” by Tara Brach, “The Mastery of Self” by Don Miguel Ruiz Jr., and “The Emerald Tablet: Alchemy for Personal Transformation” by Dennis William Hauck. To balance out the heavy texts, I’m also reading “Death of the Author” by Nnedi Okorafor and “Authority” by Jeff VanderMeer. These books have brought me to a space I’ve been stepping in and out of for months; how do I embrace different ideologies that all feel so resonant, but seem to contradict one another?
First, let me acknowledge that my relationship to desire and manifestation is most deeply rooted in my Akashic Records practice. It is my firm belief that my desires are inherently good, and that they are meant to guide me into authenticity. While holding this belief in my heart and mind, I also believe in the Buddhist teachings that attachment to desires results in suffering when those desires are not fulfilled. In line with that teaching, I understand the importance of acceptance in experiencing the present moment fully. Add to these beliefs the empowering concept that I can also influence reality to manifest my desires. How do I navigate these complex ideals without cognitive dissonance?
My starting point for reconciling these ways of being is that I don’t know, and that it’s okay not to know. Also, what is true for me need not be true for you. As a practitioner, flexibility and nuance are core foundations to my approach; my spiritual journey has been defined by changing my beliefs and stepping in and out of ways of being. The best way that I can articulate how these three concepts unify in my ontology is this:
I desire financial stability. I want enough money to ensure that all of my needs are met, and that I can pay all of my expenses. Part of shifting my reality may look like defining specific dollar amounts that I need in order to fulfill that desire. Yet, I start to question this desire for “financial stability”. Do I really desire to occupy a reality where my basic needs are held hostage by a corrupt society and government, in which the negotiations for housing and food are ever-increasing? No, I don’t. If I dig deeper into that desire, my desire is really just to have a safe place to live with access to nutritious food and healthcare for myself, my partner, and my animal companions. What if I release my attachment to the idea that money is the only solution here? What if I accept that what is better for me, my community, and my planet is a much simpler idea of abundance that is removed from materialism? From this place of acceptance and releasing expectations for how my desire manifests, I shift into a reality where simply, the physical needs of myself, my partner, and my animal companions are met. This leaves me open to any number of ways that reality can accommodate this desire. That’s just one example of how I am trying to tease at these threads…
There’s so much more to say, but this is already a lot of noodling. My parting thoughts are about the delusion of starting and promoting a business in this current moment. In this slowpocalypse, which honestly feels faster than ever before, it is so, so necessary that those of us with liberation in our hearts and minds fully embody our desires, delusions and alternate ways of being. Launching The Oracle of Ibis is my joy, and refusing to surrender my joy is an act of resistance. It is imperative that we refuse to accept the reality that is being violently forced into our spirits and psyches. We can shape our personal realities and collectively form a reality that subverts the current devastating regimes. Whether you support my business personally or not, I implore you to consider the individual and collective power that we, the dreamers, can summon into being. Our joy is not up for debate. Claim it.
If any of my work resonates with you, and you would like to support it, please consider donating to The Oracle of Ibis.
