Death for New Life

Rebirthing the Creator I AM

Aloha, Fam! Today we’re exploring the interplay between death and rebirth. You can’t have one without the other. Death is the greatest expression of freedom in our reality. In fact, it’s just another word for transcendence. Total liberation from all attachment, and as any mystic or Buddhist will tell you, attachment is the enemy of happiness.

In my introduction post, I mentioned Ophiuchus represents resurrection and rebirth in the Zodiac, and that’s what this space is meant to be… a big, huge wake up call to the seed of Divinity living inside every one of us. Reminding us of our inherent identity as eternal creatorsAND equipping us to step into that place of empowerment in our everyday lives – in little and huge ways. As sexy as that sounds, in order for the truest essence of our Soul - our powerful I AM presence – to step on the stage, the previous character we were playing needs to die. Yep. All the way dead. (If you’ve ever seen the cartoon version of Anastasia, try to imagine Bartok saying his classic line, “She’s dead sir. Dead, dead, dead.” in an adorable Russian accent.)

This is what precipitates the rebirth of the Divine soul essence we came to embody… freeing ourselves from caked on layers of conditioning, belief systems and the story of our past. Many of us fantasize about living as another version of ourselves. I’ll speak for myself and maybe you can relate. I see a Me who walks in total confidence every moment of every day. Who never questions her right to create or speak her truth. Totally free of the fear of being seen and the stupid voice of comparison. A powerful force for liberation and enlightenment - bringing magic back to the world one day at a time… she’s a bad ass! Whatever form it takes, most of us know there is a superhero version of us on the inside waiting to bust out – full blown cape and iron man suit included. But we don’t like to think about the death that must come first. The suit of indifference and self-sabotage we were wearing must be burned like the Vikings used to burn their dead. Otherwise known as the process of purification, it isn’t easy or pretty… in fact, it stings like fire because everything we defined ourselves with is being stripped from our grasp – consciously or unconsciously. If you know what’s happening when you go into one of these times, the ride can be much easier and free of fear. Death doesn’t always have to be hard. If we remember it’s the thing that leads to liberation, we can welcome it with open arms.

With that foundation laid, I’ll tell you about my most recent death portal. I can’t say I navigated it all with grace and ease, but I learned a tremendous amount. Hopefully, you can benefit from my successes and mistakes. Pro Tip: If you’re doing this incarnation thing right, death portals happen all the time. We’re always outgrowing the old version of ourselves so might as well make friends with the process. So, let’s journey back in time…

Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash

What a Death Portal Looks Like…

It started as soon as I left Kauai. A raging fever hit me on the road trip from LA to Boulder, leaving me stuck in St. George, Utah for five days waiting for it to pass so I could keep driving. It was the most surreal time – hovering between my old home and the new… feeling deeply alone and stranded. I’m used to living an alchemical life, so nothing is ever just a fever or a cold to me. I believe our Soul and the Universe are always conspiring to move us forward so everything we encounter on our path is an invitation to go deeper and wring the growth juice out of it. So you better believe that as soon as I got sick, I started asking my Soul what I needed to see. Meditation, journaling, deeply listening and allowing myself to fall apart a wee bit… What came up was a truckload of grief. I did nothing but write and cry. There’s nothing like a hard stop from your body to create space for hidden feelings to surface. Something about the cocktail of being stuck alone in a strange city helped me grieve a lifetime spent running from getting hurt in relationships the same way my mother hurt me. Keeping myself surface level or uncommitted so I could bolt anytime if things started to go south. It was confronting and yet I allowed the undoing. I learned a long time ago to stop fighting my emotions, but I didn’t realize it was just the beginning. I’d be taken into a deeper level of grief in the not-too-distant future. Beyond story and personal identification.

Cut to two weeks later… I was in the fluorescent soaked bathroom of a local coffee shop, weeping uncontrollably. Again. I’d been in Boulder for about a week and I missed Kauai so much I cried myself to sleep at night. My body still felt like shit no matter how much I rested and overall, I felt lost and dazed. I was enrolled in a program called Novel Alchemy with Heidi Reimer and on pace to finish my first draft in less than three months (which I did!) and it was all I could do to show up at the page every day. Thank the Divine for Heidi and her program because her holistic approach to writing allowed me to keep writing and be a messy human at the same time. (Note to all writers – if you’re looking for a safe space to be held while you go through the scary process of getting that book up and out of you, Novel Alchemy is GOLD.)

The fever stuck around another three weeks even though I’d been using all my alchemical tools to release the energy – including something Mama Gene calls “Swamping” in her book, Pussy, A Reclamation (a must read for any woman alive right now in my humble opinion.) Essentially you dance and fully embody your emotions – allowing yourself to move safely through them and finish with a blissful or sexy song to ignite your Eros energy – which is just to say your creation energy. This practice takes the stuck emotion and turns it into life force. During these dance sessions, more waves of grief came roaring to the surface. The intensity surprised me, yet unlike the tears I wept in St. George, these were devoid of story or any attachment to my own life experience. It was just wild, uninhibited grief gushing from somewhere deep and primal in my DNA. I let it flow.

Still the fever raged, so I finally reached out to my friend, Atasiea, a gifted healer for some back-up. The fever left in the middle of the session and never came back. Oddly enough, or maybe not, we didn’t work on my body. We worked on my heart. Through a process called Theta healing, Atasiea gave me “downloads” to address the emotional pain hiding at the bottom of the illness – much of which centered around deep feelings of powerlessness and not feeling free in my own life. I left feeling like a new woman, but turns out I wasn’t finished dying. Not yet.

Fast forward to Christmas, 2024. Almost two months later, and although the waves of grief were gone, I was still in a transformational process. I’d just finished the first draft of the novel and with that put the side for a moment, I was able to focus fully on myself again. Which brought up so many questions. Like I was standing at a crossroads. Almost as soon as I arrived in Boulder, I longed to move back to Kauai, but it felt as though there was something for me to accomplish in Boulder. I kept remembering how Kauai told me I would grow strong before I came back to her. It was a fascinating process to watch – doubting my desire to come home, talking myself out of it, looking for outside guidance, guilt tripping myself into staying because there must be a “lesson” to learn… all coping mechanisms I’d developed in childhood to reinforce my own powerlessness. It shocked me to realize that, despite leaving the church, I was still operating in a fearful relationship with the Divine. Afraid to decide one way or the other because of a deeply instilled programming that “God” (or someone outside of me) would tell me what to do and I was to obey or suffer the consequences. I was still outsourcing my power, damn it!

This time, however, I witnessed my thoughts with enough distance to question them. As I did, I chose to instill a new program. One where life is beautiful, I have the right to choose and learning and growth don’t have to come at the hands of suffering. They can take place in the middle of bliss. (Sidenote: I believe humanity at large is learning this right now… the Age of Pisces taught us transcendence was accomplished through great pain and suffering. Unfortunately, that’s what we took away from the story of Jesus and his death… missing the real message of his life.)

By the time Christmas rolled around, I’d decided to move back, and I’d found the perfect place. Funny enough, the moment I DECIDED, it magically fell in my lap. There’s a lesson on magick in there. Desire turned into INTENTION aka decision will manifest. Period. The place I’d found wasn’t just in the exact location I wanted, but it included two feline babies ready for me to adopt (something I’d literally prayed for just a couple weeks earlier.) It all came together two days before Christmas just as I was entering a twelve-day journey with the spirit of Rosemary.

Photo by GKVP on Unsplash

Rosemary Saves the Day

A quick word about Rosemary… I capitalize the name because she’s a being to me now. I’ve communicated with her and felt her in my body. In ancient traditions, Rosemary is deeply connected with the Divine mother, remembrance – which often brings grief as your body remembers, purification, protection and spiritual self-discovery. She brings healing to mother-daughter relationships of all shapes and sizes, and in my own personal experience, she greatly heightens sensitivity. I found while I was with her, everything I experienced felt like it was happening times ten. Which is a lot for an already super sensitive being.

I spent all of Christmas Day with her. I cleansed my space with her. I washed my body with her. I wrote a letter of intention for my journey and opened ceremonial space with prayers and song. For me, this was where the rebirth of my True Self began. Rosemary is also known to activate the Sun and Mercury archetype within us (vital identity and Voice.) My deepest prayer was to “awaken my true self, my innermost being… to remember myself, my soul with you. To embody and know more of my true inner light and truth. I surrender into the heart of the Divine Mother and awaken the seed of my heart, the seed which I want to embody as an offering to this world.” After offering this prayer, I pulled oracle cards asking for guidance for my time with her, and wouldn’t you know? I pulled a card called “Original Self.” It speaks of freeing yourself from the projections of others and coming back to the truest essence of who you are in this world – with the bravery to live as that version of you.

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Having never journeyed with a plant this way, I had no idea what to expect. I thought it would be gentle and just sort of hum along on the background of my life. WRONG. Turns out her teachings weren’t subtle. Looking back, I see my decision to move back home was a part of this journey because it kickstarted a hugely alchemical relationship situation for me. In short, my decision didn’t sit well with someone I looked to as a mentor, and as she expressed displeasure, I witnessed my body respond from a place of fear and trauma because the resonance of the situation was just similar enough to trigger super deep parts of my mother wound. Parts I’d never gotten to address because when I left ten years ago, it was about safety and survival, not healing. Here Rosemary was – serving me the opportunity to see my body’s trauma response and hold myself safe while claiming my space and asserting my boundaries. Which is what truly terrified me. it was never safe to have a boundary growing up. But now, I knew I was strong enough to not only hold myself through the fear, but through any backlash my boundary setting elicited. This was how I became my own mother.

This was the first week or so of my journey with Rosemary. I remember someone telling me that to reset a broken bone that healed incorrectly, you have to RE-BREAK the bone. This felt like that, but it was the only way to set me right. After that situation calmed down and the clutter cleared, the last bit of my journey with Rosemary was finally devoted to helping me “awaken the seed” as I’d prayed. It was during this time the golden butterfly instance came back to me and the vision for the Ophiuchus Chronicles dropped in. I was receiving illumination from all the aspects of the Universe. Crows were following me wherever I went. Messages were coming in loud and HOT. It felt like riding a wave of Divine inspiration, and I loved it! Then, death came knocking again the last two days of my journey.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

Interestingly, I’d pulled the Purification card the night before, and on cue, I woke up the next morning dull and lifeless. This time my body didn’t need to get sick to get my attention. I’d learned from my experiences and just sank into it to see what was waiting for me. I followed my intuition and ended up resting and doing a guided embodied movement practice from my friend, Jen Murphy’s Celtic Creatives membership. It released more epic waves of grief. My mind reeled… there was more? But I trusted my body and let her lead me into the grief, which again, felt impersonal and without story. Super strong emotions, but no personal attachment. I’m highlighting this because it’s an essential component of really letting something DIE in us. It’s where the alchemy occurs. When we FEEL without identifying with the feeling, this enables the emotion (energy in motion) to transform into creative life force.

What started that day lasted five days with many ups and downs. I’d think it was over and then get knocked down again. If you’ve ever experienced depression, you may know what I mean. This wasn’t total depression, but had the same feeling of “I don’t know when this will end.” Because I was just at the end of my journey with Rosemary, I knew it was her working in me. Looking back, I realize an old version of me died in my time with her. Through reclaiming my space and power, choosing to trust myself and my desires and learning “No” is a complete sentence, I killed the people pleaser in me. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt she died and won’t come back. Yet, she was the defense mechanism that enabled my survival for many years, so once she was gone, I had to grieve. Grief is the process of purification. It’s as though you’re immersing yourself in the Sea of Sadness, allowing the salt water to heal your wounds and cleanse your being, and when you emerge, you are refreshed and cleansed.

Another lesson I’ve seen post-mortem is: Resistance is the only thing that causes pain. I’d love to say I seamlessly flowed through this death portal without freaking out, but that wouldn’t be true. Because this isn’t my first rodeo with grief, I had some idea what was happening, but I still fought it. For me, that looks like my Inner Critic handing me all kinds of lines about how I’m making it up or should just power through. I’m sad to say, I spent a lot of time doubting if I was doing the right thing by allowing myself to go down into the pit of despair and worrying I would never emerge. Funny though, the doubt and worry were the only painful parts. The actual grief felt good, like a cathartic release. Animals are great teachers for this. When something terrifying or sad happens, they move through their emotions through their bodies very quickly, without inhibition and move on with their lives. See the gazelle who just escaped from a lion on the savannah of Africa, yet can be found a few hours later lazily grazing in another location. We’re blessed with pre-frontal cortexes, so we make meaning. But we don’t have to. We can just feel it and let it go.

And here we are… It’s been six weeks since I ended my journey with Rosemary, and the transformation has been more profound than I could have expected. She changed me on a cellular level. The kind of change I know I can’t go back from… because a character I’d been playing most of my life died. In its place, a truer, more solid version of me has emerged. The Ophiuchus Chronicles vision solidified, I’m building my astrology and coaching business and fine-tuning the unique offering I bring to this world… which, as you might imagine, has a lot to do with every single one of us finding our Original Self. Turns out the journey with Rosemary wasn’t just showing me what she wanted to give to me, she was showing me what I can give to others.

Which brings me back to death for rebirth. Not of some ethereal “new you” with no teeth. We aren’t pulling from thin air here. At our core, every single one of us are Divine and the Masters of our own destiny. We’re living in a time when that is becoming more widely known and accepted (it’s about time!)

We are ALL made of stardust… AND at the same time no two stars are the same. We each came to shine a unique light no one else can shine. That light cannot shine if we hide from darkness in fear or run away from death when it’s knocking on our door. Remember – death is just graduation to your next highest expression, a more transcendent version of you. It is our dearest friend because it comes just before resurrection. Life is a spiral – ever leading upwards IF we allow ourselves to escape the loop of repeating patterns, behaviors and thoughts by letting them die and stepping UP out of the loop. That’s when we engage with Magick – unseen metaphysical forces – that propel us into growth we couldn’t have imagined! Something we’ll explore more soon!

Photo by Christopher Campbell on Unsplash

For today, my inquiry for you is:

What in your life is asking to die?

Where do you feel something bubbling to the surface asking to be seen and released?

Where are fear, discomfort or anxiety about the future asking you to take a closer look?

I’ll end there for today, but I do have to give another nod of gratitude to Mother Earth for supplying the muscle power I needed for my own death and rebirth through the spirit of Rosemary. She was and is the source of my deepest grounding and transformation and the force that empowered me. If you’re not used to thinking of plants as sentient beings, try it on for size. They carry the wisdom of Gaia and the stars – because just like us, they are made of both. If this feels intriguing, let me know and I can send you more info. A good place to start is simply to listen to the life all around you. Which plants call your attention? If you stop and listen, what do you see, sense, feel or hear?

Okay – I’m really stopping now. Until next time…

From my heart to yours!

Kyra

P.S. I’m in building mode and I would love to hear from you! My desire is to build an alchemical library and community space for those committed to an alchemical life. So, what would like you to see, hear or read more about? All thoughts are welcome, and feel free to DM me! And please like, comment and share. It really does help. Mahola nui!