Write like an elephant.

I moved houses again recently, and in the process decided I would no longer have a storage unit. I asked the movers to bring all that old, extra stuff into my living room and I spent a day going through it.

I found two elephants. One I remember from my childhood and another clay elephant I’d bought at a craft show years ago that promised to signify abundance.

I asked my mother, who I’d just recently reconnected with, if the older elephant had been hers. She didn’t remember it and that’s okay.

These elephants tugged at the mystic in me. Why two in a row? Why were they showing up now and why was I feeling this connection to my mother through this elephant she didn’t even remember? I sat them in my bedroom on the shelf that is my altar of sacred things, but my altar wouldn’t flush out with my usual sacred items for a few more weeks. It felt like the message in this last move was, “Just clear. Just allow things to settle before filling anything back in. Have blank space.”

If I’m being real – with myself, with you, with anyone at all – to be honest I had just moved twice because I was playing small. I was. I took a job to help “start a community” and it was such a sham, but I let myself get into that situation and also, there was so much soul material in that experience that I really needed to integrate.

This is the Sacred Remembering path – it’s mystical, messy, full of real life “initiation” and the potential to reflect and grow. Thankfully, life seems to be reflecting to me that there is a new steadiness and pace in my journey. Maybe like the swagger of an elephant.

But try explaining this to my fourteen year old who thinks his mother is providing him with an unstable upbringing… that’s another story.

It was all a divine reroute, let’s say that. On that reroute, one day I felt the “ping” (intuition) to drive to Pennsylvania and knock on my parents’ door. I knew that my mother wasn’t there and my father likely was. I hadn’t spoken to him in nearly five years, and my mother barely at all. I had been so scared of my father growing up, this deep imprint of fear inside of me that went down into spaces unknown and here I was at a space and time in my life when I just knew that something in me had been running from that fear, landing me in shitty situations, and I just turned around and faced it. My soul was letting me know that it was done, and I was to drive ten hours, knock on his door, and literally just face it. So I did that.

What happened? Well, we spent about five minutes together and in those five minutes, and in front of my teenage son, I heard the two things from my father that I think my girl/woman self never before wanted to hear. One, that I wasn’t his daughter anymore. And two, a denial that he had ever been my perpetrator. Something I’d finally named publicly to the family at the age of 40.

Those things sound huge, but to me at this point in my healing and life journey, they were just words. I had turned to face the things I’d run from – rejection and denial – and then I heard them, and I was still who I am. It was so beautiful. It was such a gift that my soul had “pinged” me to go and do that, so that I could experience that feeling of freedom.

And then after that we saw my grandmother and got in the car and drove ten hours back home.

Two weeks later I moved into a clean-slate apartment. My mother co-signed because my credit is shit. In all the times before, I would have stopped myself from admitting that, but if I’m going to write like an elephant, I can’t stop myself anymore.

My credit is shit because I have decades of struggle with money and finance, which links to deep childhood trauma, every kind of emotional manipulation and abuse, and then being a single mom trying to be a spiritual entrepreneur, which was going pretty well until 2022 when I called out family secrecy and somehow had a flair up of rape trauma and loneliness that resulted in a cocktail of circumstances. Including, obviously, taking a “job” to start a “community” that wasn’t even a real thing.

I’m not a victim. To any of it. I’m just naming what it all is – and it’s all got a soupy quality to it….

But what I’m getting at is that my family all the while has no idea the work I’m actually doing – to ensure no more children are hurt, to heal the lineage of reptilian bloodlines, to clear the earth grids – those are the unmentionables. But I haven’t even told them anything about anything in five years because when I became this spiritual entrepreneur, obviously a part of me was extricating myself from the family system of silence and dysfunction. And I just felt I couldn’t have a family anymore if I took this path, given the nature of my family.

Uuuuggghhhhh, I’m sick of writing about this shit and also feel like I haven’t even begun if I’m going to truly write like an elephant.

So back to the elephants.

I got curious about it. It’s now week-four of living in this new place, I’ve listened to the voice of Spirit (Soul, Source – the voice) tell me to get back to my life’s mission work. To reestablish Sacred Remembering in the community and the podcast offerings. To lay a new groundwork. Okay, I did that. The new podcast intro is out for edits and thank God my executive functioning is coming back online after about a year of f*ckery. (My friend Keely, side note, recently joked with me as I told her that my brain was coming back online from my trauma and she said something like – great, just in time for natural degeneration. Yeah. Nothing like being 42 and needing your mom to co-sign for your apartment.) Voice of shame! Keep going! Write like an elephant!

I looked up elephant medicine. As in, what is the spiritual significance of these elephants showing up in my life? I saw a few things. Elephants symbolize nurturance, deep feminine essence and maternal nature, steadiness, abundance, and it is the destroyer of obstacles. It is also known to steer you in the right direction. One book said, “Trust this gentle, noble creature… it illuminates the way with the light of self-knowledge.”

At this time, other divine “pings” have included:

• Get off social media for a week (that was amazing)
• For the love of all things holy, stop looking at people’s reactions on social media (a forever habit)
• Stay focused. There’s this sweet, “Tunnel vision” sort of feeling that God’s got me, like “Woman, if you stay in your lane right now and just listen to me, steady on, we’re going to bring this new part through together.” Very elephant-like, come to think of it.
• Write. Write creatively, write your books, write.

And I’ve been listening! I have been non-traumatized, empowered, faithful, grateful, in the light… “I’m back!” Really, though, I have totally rocked this “get back on track in a new way” period of time I’ve been in. It’s so refreshing.

So then I hear Spirit say after yoga one morning this week, “Write a letter to your mom and tell her what you do.” This was coming from something she had said weeks ago in one of those conversations my inner child never wants to hear where she’s telling me that I might just need to go get a school job. I heard her say, “I don’t know what you even do, but maybe you need a job.”

I understand that this is her coming from what she knows, and a generation that sacrificed a lot of true desire for steadiness. I’m not opposed to working or steadying myself and my child with a “job” of some kind, but I’d always rather my soul work carry us, which could look like long-term contract work, consulting, project management, or these various things I feel coming.

And I realized I was still holding this fear that related to the family split from five years ago that said something like, “Maybe your own work won’t carry you, and you’ll need to go back and get a job.” Key words: go back. If you’re afraid to not have to “go back” to something, you run away from it. So I was doing a bit of that the entire time.

So the voice said, “Well, tell her what you do.”

I wrote her an email that was like a spiritual coming-out. I wrote down the kinds of things that I get paid for that she may not be able to even fathom. I acknowledged my healing capacities, told her I talk to ancestors including her father, help women heal sexual trauma, help couples, on and on.

I gave myself full credit in the most gorgeous way. I had never even given myself this acknowledgement before. It was like another “turn and face it” moment. In my early entrepreneurial years, I was always wondering who was looking, who would approve. If I was running from disapproval and rejection, then if I was going out on my own to build this coaching business, I sure as heck needed to receive those things from the business. But guess what? I wasn’t allowed to pull that kind of shit and have it work out. 😉

After I wrote the list to my mother, I had a good cathartic cry. I went into the woods with my dog and I noticed that my breath and heartspace were very, very relaxed. Hmm. Healing.

Last night before I went to sleep, Spirit reminded me, “Get that ornament that your mother gave you out of that box.” The ornament was shipped in a Christmas box in late 2018. We didn’t have much of a relationship then either, in part because I truly felt like I had had to be silent for so long about abuse in order to have a family, and then I decided not to be silent, and my mother stayed in her marriage to my father. But she sent this ornament and it was a decoupaged heart with glitter and glass and said, “Your story matters.”

Your story matters. Encouraged by my mother.

So this morning, early before the sunrise, I went to the box in the other room and got out the ornament. I set it on the (now full) altar, beside the elephants, and began to journal.

I just want to say – that feeling, the one where we listen to the voice of Spirit which is really the voice of US – it’s a great feeling. Kind of the best. And, the very voice that trauma interrupts us from listening to because we frenetically think we have to be doing something else, or we’re just fighting like hell for our brain to hang with us in task and clarity throughout the day.

So I’m journaling, about elephants and this letter to my mother and spirit telling me to write… and I realize… I need to write like an elephant.

That’s why things have been stuck.

The way through obstacles, for me, is to write.

To tell the stories that I haven’t known how to tell. To tell them even though every flippin time I do, I think someone judges me for being weak. Or they thank me for my vulnerability and I think, “Does that mean you think I’m weak!?” And then I want to tell you all the shit I have figured out, I’m on the other side and strong and there’s a happy ending, and I try to write a blog or social media post about something I’m smart about, and then I look, and guess what, no one has read it.

Because that wasn’t the invitation. The invitation was to tell the story, to tell it in as many different ways as it wants to be told. And yes, it might be a bit messy at first, because I’ve got a backlog inside of me. But maybe if I write like an elephant, I can make some art out of it all.

So, here I am. Steady on. Channeling my inner elephant.

If you are a woman on a path of remembering who you truly are, simultaneously healing and ever-evolving while you stand in your present-moment truth, you may enjoy the Sacred Remembering Community for support, solidarity, and the Sacred. Learn more here: https://sacred-remembering-community.mn.co/

Thanks for reading. If you choose to comment, I’d love to hear how this piece impacted you, your process, your day, your sensations. You.

Thank you.