I’m teaching again? (& a story about our hearts) (copy 01)

Not everyone has the resources for high quality “therapy” or expensive lightwork/shadow-work programs. This is a main reason I’m offering the following  as an alternative (donation-based) approach. If you know someone who is suffering and who holds the story that they cannot afford to “work on themselves,” please direct them here if you feel so called. 
 

For those of you evolving your consciousness, consciously through EYC, your weekly content drops today. If you’ve had a wild few weeks, please listen to what I posted…it helped lift my spirits tremendously.  Love. 

Register here: https://erikakluthe.com/register/ Or to read more about it, click:  https://erikakluthe.com/donation-based-membership-details/ Feel free to email or text (see website) with questions. Cancel easily anytime. No pressure. Just an opportunity to feel better in a wild world. 

Well, it’s been a damn week. And I’ve got a story for all ya’ll…

Doing the deep work I do with individuals requires me to do the same (Ugh! And Yay!). For months I had been getting the intuitive message to find a new trusted being to support me with “spiritual direction.” I delayed delayed delaaayyyyed, “looking for the perfect fit,” just tempting the cosmic clock/sledgehammer to slam down onto my head, which it indeed did. Continue reading for the parts of the story I’m ready to tell. 

Anyhow, two days ago my brand spankin new “spiritual director/mentor” told me a story about her partner. It was the most glaring metaphor for the way I am experiencing our current energetic moment/atmosphere. So, this partner, we will call him Will. 😉 Will is a musician who writes meditation music. He has been doing it for many years. In fact, he continues to use the music software with which he originally learned to make music. But by this time, 2025, that software is very old. So old and out of date, in fact, that it is slowing down his process, badly frustrating him and causing any number of troubles. But he is REFUSING to learn a new program. It is just “easier” to keep working with the old program he knows, though he is hitting snag after snag with this nearly defunct software. The metaphor here, to me, is a collective one. The big message I’m getting is this: Our old ways of being are quickly going out of date and need an upgrade, ASAP, lest we want trouble. And since I best learn through story and metaphor (and pain, apparently!), I’m sharing how this manifested in my own life over the last two weeks. And it has run as if by clockwork, the clock being the phases of the moon (most especially full and new). Today, Sunday April 27th we have a New Moon in Taurus. I will be reverently observing this moon phase as I did NOT our last full moon (in Libra, April 12th). Sometimes I think the misdirected rebel in me likes to just test this odd quantum universe by not playing by its rules. It’s like telling a child not to stick the fork in the light socket. But the child is just beyond compelled to see—is there really electricity in there? And what will it do? Having ignored previously mentioned intuitive call to upgrade my spiritual self care, so to speak, I FAFO’ed (F Around and Find Out). That full moon acted like a clock that read that my time was up! Remember the sweet little raccoon pic I sent in my last lil love note? Well, we happened to find one another on that full moon, and he was the symbolic beginning of a wild week of Trickster energy for me (the trickster wears a mask!) If curious, look up the metaphysical significance of raccoon. I look up ALL significant animals that cross my path. It’s a part of symbolic vision, a way that I “read the book that God/the uni-multiverse has written all around us that we have not yet learned to read.” (That’s a paraphrase of the words of theologian & philosopher Saint Augustine of Hippo.)* 

My Trickster definition:

1. Something that at first glance looks either sweet or comical or safe or unassuming. 
2. You pretty quickly find out that this “sweet-natured” thing is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. 
3. You are left feeling dizzied and hurt by said thing, thinking it a “bad” thing, only to realize that it was A. Answering an important prayer or high thought, B. Pushing you (even if painfully) in the most benevolent direction, and C. Acting as a “dark angel,” aka: doing for you what you could not or would not do for yourself. 

Every  single  day  since  the encounter with the trickster, I got struck by more tricky trickery trickster energy. It is a long and hard-to-believe list of pitfalls, all of which I will not name, but here are a couple:

1. April 15th: I had a large amount of cash I was keeping in the freezer (it was between 10 & 17 thousand dollars. Some of that was from the sale of an old car. It was safety money. It was, if something crazy happens with the banks, I’ll have dollars. And why the freezer? Well, if you’ve every lived through a house fire, you will know. Long story short: my partner cleaned out the freezer weeks previously. I had not even thought to check on the envelope. Of course it was still there. I told her it was there. I do not, however, think I told her that I had disguised it as frozen meat, like the trusty movies had taught me to do. Yes, indeed she threw the envelope away. $10,000.00-$17,000.00. Gone. In my state of freeze and shock that day, I also had to do my taxes. (Yes, at the last minute, as I do.) And pay the United States government several thousand dollars, as I do every year as a self-employed person. Fast forward through the next few days of doing everything I could to unfreeze my own shocked nervous system, the lesson…it is high time to confront the old remaining fear-based money wounds and lack programming. 
2. Are you familiar with A Course in Miracles? With the idea that everything is either a choice in the direction of Fear or Love? Well, that Monday I had a choice. I needed community and support and I shied away from it due to a tender nervous system and went back to an old coping mechanism: exercise. But I was far from the water, so could not swim. Jogging is out, so says my 40+ year old joints, even brisk walking can hurt. Hey… let’s rollerblade! Fast forward to the scene where the clownish looking fellow on a BMX bike careens across the empty farm road I frequent. He misses me by inches. “Oh my God, that was so close,” he says as we both slow to a near stop. I notice a face full of tattoos and a detached, perhaps high? gaze. All I can focus on is the tattooed hummingbird on his cheek bone. That is an old and well-known symbol for me (the hummingbird is always energized because it continuously returns to the source that feeds it, aka: what enlivens and helps to continue to feed our very souls.) A split second later I am scrambling to escape from his large, scary-looking, unleashed dog that is barking its head off and heading for me. I had survived the bike crash, but not the dog crash. He lept at me and I wound up on my tailbone with a bad road rash boo boo and an aching body to heal. More tricksters! 

It had already been several days of constant pitfalls. By the time the dog & the shamanic-clown-of-a-man with the hummingbird facial tat got to me, I had surrendered. I knew I was operating on an old system. I could feel it. I had been getting messages about it. I needed to upgrade and I needed support. 

It is so easy and natural for me to care for and help others. It has never been easy for me to help myself. It has taken me many years to turn this pattern around and is often still hard. And this was part of my lesson as I slowly rolled home that evening. Had that crash not happened I would have continued to wallow in the self-pity pool I had been swimming in for days. And I would have found a way to express my upset inwardly. It may no longer be booze and drugs and all of the fun harmful toys of my past, but it would be some destructive distant second third or forth cousin. But I did not have the energy for it. I was forced to get home to care for my wounds, rest, and stop running from my feelings. It was literally the next evening that I mustered up the courage to get back in to community, and I procured my new “spiritual director:” The very thing I had been avoiding for months. 

Like out of date software, our old ways of operating are no longer being energetically supported. It’s time to leave behind the non-Self-supporting habits including my favorite: what the Tibetan Book of the Dead terms: “active laziness,”  Ie: those habits we’ve been leaning on that help us perhaps feel better in the short term and are disguised as self-care but they are really clever choices our egos make to keep us from the real work at hand (the stuff deep in our hearts we know our souls need to in order to breathe and to rest and to evolve). 

There’s a sweet guy, Jimmy, who teaches at Flow Yoga, who at the end of a vinyasa class said: “The light and the shadow in me honors the light and the shadow in you.” What? I had only ever heard every single yoga teacher say just that phrase but minus the shadow part. I was so moved by what Jimmy had said that we talked for a long while about it after class. It is now a favorite saying and should I decide to steal it, I will both ask Jimmy and I will give him credit. 

I often think of it this way: When the “light angels” cannot get our attention with the soft intuitive nudges we feel, they call on their friends the “dark angels” (the tricksters?) to get our attention in a much more obvious, sometimes painful, way. But it is ALL in the name of our best interest. I swear to God I believe this with my every cell. 

My beloved Dr. Caroline Myss said this this week: “If your life is being dismantled, you are being scaffolded. This is law.” 

If you who are reading this are in the dark, dissolving like the caterpillar in the goo-phase, I pray that you know, deeply and surely in your bones, that you are forming the most awe-inducing wings. This is just the way our wild quantum world works. This is how all evolves: birth, death, birth, death, light, dark, light, dark, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. 

Many of us NEED community and support right now. I know I do. And even if your sweet rebellious introverted self often fights it as mine fights it, “ask and it is given:” (this too is law). If you know you need support and to be surrounded by your people, but can’t bring yourself to procuring this, ask for universal assistance. I did. Learn from my ouches this week, however, and ask that what you need comes to you gently. I forgot that part this time. Oops. 

I feel called to add this here: we are deeply, wholly and completely Loved by the Creative Intelligence of this universe. I guarantee you this. You cannot “make a mistake” or “rebel” or “break rules/universal laws” badly enough to dim the light of this Love. I swear this to you. If I know nothing else, I know this.

Should I pick up any sub jobs or take a permanent class or two, I’ll let you know in this newsletter. Promise. Also, I am working on a next iteration of the EYC experience. For now, peeps currently in EYC, your weekly has posted (these are things that helped me get through this tough week!) To those of you who have been supporting me in the early experimental phases of my attempts at online offerings, I have to thank you again, as my gratitude bag can’t tie shut it’s so full.
 

With you in the light and equally sacred tricky sticky shadowy parts. 

E

______________________________________________________

*The quote, “God has written a book all around us that we have not yet learned to read,” is attributed to Augustine of Hippo. While the exact wording may vary, he often spoke of a “book of the world” or “the very appearance of created things” as a way to understand God’s creation. 
Augustine believed that just as people read books to learn about God, they can also learn about God by observing the world around them, which he considered God’s “book”. He emphasized that this book was not written with ink, but rather with the creation itself.

 Click the image below to begin

           Evolving Your Consciousness