New Year’s wishes of ease and grace to you!

A few days ago, on the cusp of our collective leap out into 2021, I shared some of The Only Prayers You Really Ever Need:

Help

Thanks

Wow

Sorry

Mmmmmm

F*^#$@!!!!!&?cK!

These are non-denominational prayers, of course. Prayers suited to the particular sensibilities of my fellow rebels and heathens.

I also promised to share each of those Five Prayers with you, in the forms of poems, paintings, dances, glances.

So here is highly-esteemed number one on the list: Help.

This Help Prayer comes in the form of one of my paintings, titled “Despair.” I prayed, er painted it about six years ago, from the sightless center of a Dark Night of my Soul.

{Just a light dusting of fluff, to be sure!}

In all seriousness, [First Name], it’s been that kind of year, hasn’t it? Or for some of us, that kind of decade.

Despair is a prayer. A mute howl for Help.

Despair — like so many faces of The Dark — is an Invitation.

An invitation to come closer. To feel it, all of it.
To be lost.
To come Home. To become Home.
To become unblind. To see Beauty even in, especially in, the Ugly.
To stop the self-warring.
To Love It All.

Or said powerfully by a portion of Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s “Invitation:”

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

Also, my friend, in February the gates will open to:

Mining For Gold in The Dark Night of Your Soul
A 22-Day Immersion into the invitation and transformation of The Dark

Simply put, I help women move through the hardest shit of our lives, and become Queens. Nice job description, wouldn’t you agree?

I have discovered over the last decade and several prolonged journeys through The Dark, that when it comes to the gnarliest unlit realms of life, the top line item on my job description is to GO FIRST.

And then come back and share with you the way THROUGH — with the least floundering and the most grace possible.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that people love to share that making it through a dark time of despair is what made them who they are today: Strong. Clear. Resilient. Unshakably confident.

But how often do they share the nitty-gritty of HOW they made it through? HOW they kept going when it was impossible? HOW they found new tools when those of their “work-harder-warrior” not only failed them, but made things worse? HOW they found gold in that massive pile of shit?

Almost never, right?

In this Immersion, I will share all those HOWs with you.

Come get yourself on the Waitlist, and I’ll reach out to you first when enrollment is open, along with a sweet early birdie bonus and discount.

All the prayers,

PS: Image is “Despair” by me, LiYana Silver. Oil on canvas. 2015.