JULY 29 2026
FULL MOON IN AQUARIUS
cultivating a garden within the Field
Within a meditation practice, though many factors across the different layers of our experience contribute, becoming uncomfortably restless ultimately speaks to the fact that too much energy has built up in the system and must be expressed.
Over and over again, I have been shown by Spirit: this is a creative realm. We are meant to take conscious action — to bring our inner images and ideas into form, to apply this stored energy creatively. As we feel and follow, discern, iterate, these actions shape our reality, in service of the inner vision. But we may have long since lost touch with our ability to sense what wants to move through us. We may never have learned how to express ourselves honestly, or it may never have felt safe to do so.
On the whole, many of us have repressed our innate expression in favor of following the cues of others. When we were young, we may have experienced authenticity and belonging as being profoundly at odds. We may have learned to blunt ourselves, or internalize false conclusions about who we are, what we are not (enough), what is right, and where we stand in relation to the world. (All of this downwind of all that our ancestors navigated and survived, and all that our souls have experienced.) This embedded conflict and confusion continues to shape how we navigate convention and external expectations.
In truth, my own spiritual journey has been arduous. Seeking real resolution and reclamation has meant traveling an ever more complex labyrinth, at times in utter frustration. The inner matrix has faithfully reflected the greater conflict seen in the world: full of sorrow and rage, sickness and old injury; full of hope and potential. Compassion. Waves of inspiration, understanding. And what has carried me has been an unwavering faith in and commitment to Truth, and a resolve to be who I truly am.
The labyrinth did not yield through a single doorway. Each apparent resolution opened onto another layer, another history, another dimension of what was asking to be met. I have followed these threads toward their roots and, at the center, found an enduring light — something essential that has remained intact and whole. It is this light I am now carrying back into the world, learning to live and create from it more freely.
Among the most surprising revelations of my shamanic path has been the reality of the spiritual forces moving beneath the visible world — the forces that shape, distort, entangle, and assist our lives. Most exciting to me is the nature and extent of our creative power, and what becomes possible when we learn to interact consciously within the spiritual and energetic planes.
This summer has felt exceptionally hot on an energetic level, with a fiery and unwieldy yang in the air. The need for cooling yin, the release of excess heat, and the revival of the receptive and restorative is more relevant than ever.
Much of my time in the cave has been about understanding the Receptive and unblocking the paths to deeper embodiment and cultivating a devotional relationship with the Feminine principle. The Receptive is core to how we heal, how we metabolize, how we remember and activate our gifts, and realize more fully who we are.
And of course, what we receive must be lived. Receptivity without creative action becomes suspension, just as constant creation without its counterpart can become empty, depleted, or disconnected from its true source. Our gifts are meant to be shared, expressed, and brought into relationship with the world. In living truthfully as who we are, our original nature is given form and we fulfill our particular way of participating in the greater whole. This is part of dharma, our purpose: our gifts enacted in service of the coherence of life.
So we exist within this dance of the Creative ䷀ and the Receptive ䷁, the celestial and the terrestrial. Through conscious action, sentient awareness, and sustained practice, we cultivate skill and the capacity to receive, embody, and bring more of life and coherence into form.
In this sense, we cultivate the self as we cultivate a garden. What is inherent may already be present as seed or potential, but it must still be nourished, strengthened, and brought into fuller expression through embodied contact, practice and tending.
The Field is the larger living intelligence within which we exist: spirit, mystery, nature, collective, ancestry, possibility, the Dream — and the unseen and material conditions of life. The garden is the particular form made possible through our participation with that Field.
The energetic centers/fields within our subtle systems become more coherent and more capable of holding, transforming, and expressing energy through cultivation. And so do we. Our coherence, in turn, contributes to the growing coherence of the whole.
apples and plums in our garden
Alongside this inner cultivation, I have been taking slow and painstaking steps toward realizing a physical garden while also tending to deficiencies within my own body. There is something deeply connected about healing depleted soil while working to restore one’s own depleted ground. Both require patience, nourishment, attention, and repeated acts of care. Both reveal how life may return after its resources have been expended.
The garden is also an act of offering back to the Earth: regenerating the soil, restoring its ecology, and tending a place over time in grateful reciprocity — this is what is called ebo: the Yoruba word for sacrifice and offering, a giving that helps restore relationship and opens a path for life to move differently. The labor is part of the offering. The time, care, water, devotion, and attention are part of it. It is a way of returning life force to the Earth in recognition of how much we continually receive. And Earth herself is a most sacred garden within the Field of the Universe.
Through tending relationship with the land and the water, there is also the possibility of reclaiming greater sovereignty. Not sovereignty as separation or self-sufficiency in an absolute sense, but sovereignty through direct relationship with the sources of nourishment, medicine, beauty, and order.
I imagine food, medicine, ritual plants, and flowers continuing to gradually take root here — things that can feed, heal, cleanse, protect, and bring beauty and magic into daily life. It will become sanctuary for family and wildlife, and its ground a place where relationship with the spirits, the ancestors, and natural intelligence is consciously tended.
This letter marks the beginning of sharing more of what emerges from that cultivation. I will be sharing its fruits through teachings, practices, technologies, creative work, experiments, and medicine — along with what I continue to learn through tending the body, the spirit, and the land.
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I am also opening space for individual sessions for those navigating transition, persistent patterns, the many-layered complexity of life, or a sense that something within them is asking to be understood and brought into fuller expression. These sessions are a space for deep inquiry, clear perception, and movement toward greater coherence across the layers involved.
If you would like to follow this journey as it unfolds, or learn more about working together, I welcome you to join the letter below.
LETTERS FROM THE TEMPLE GARDEN