Beth Lenco

I want to write on my blog more. That’s it. I have more to say, and with SUCH A BUSY practice, I find little time to write anymore. But this moon is special. Not only is my Neptune in Sagittarius but my moon and Jupiter are in the 9th house and the sign of Sag is in my 11th house -the house of wishes come true. So after such an intense Scorpio eclipse season I’m due (we’re all due!) for some joyous wishes coming to fruition.

Astrology is a passion of mine. It began as a way to try and understand my blocked energy and contradictions. In the process I discovered me -what is truly me and what was a program that was in the way. I began to understand where to put my energy and focus. You can too. Whether you book a consultation with me or take the time to figure it out on your own (although I highly recommend booking with me!) you will gain so much from learning to read your own chart. Nothing is more accurate than astrology. When I add shamanic healing, flower essences, energy work, and tarot to the cauldron, a most amazing Alchemy takes place.

It is such an enchanting time right now. This life. There is so much potential for awakening the spirit and transforming the soul. The tools are in our hands now and we need to use them wisely. We all have much more power than we realize. So as we incubate on this new moon, awaiting the rebirth, what is it that you want to bring forth in the world and your life? Take some time right now to write about that. Make a wish. Take your wish to the wind, sea, fire, or earth. Speak it to the elements and pray that it come from the highest wishes for the planet. We are evolving together and we need each other to use our brains to uplift the collective.

Blessed Be

What does a spiritual calling look like? I’m sure if you googled this question you’d get many intelligent systematic breakdowns of the details and steps of a spiritual calling. (Breakdown being the optimum word!). But I didn’t google it. I want to share my experience and perhaps a snippet of the many stories I have been privileged to hear over the years. So if this topic interests you, read on and dig deeper!

Most of the time in western culture, we grow up in a world that denies the soul, and the expressive qualities of soulful people. I think all children are in touch with the imaginative soul, but some might be particularity inclined to moodiness, sensitivities, animals, music, art, and nature to name a few soulful indicators.

Sensitive children usually have to develop strong defences in order to survive through family and school life. These defences might look like substance addictions, perfectionism and obsessions, trying to do everything right, people pleasing, or being overly nice. These and other survival skills will get them where society expects them to go for a little while. It’s only when they are older that cracks begin to show and these walls start to break down. This can show up any time, but a big surge will be around the age of 28 during the first Saturn Return. The pressure of keeping the soul locked down is too much and the soul always wins, as it is infinitely stronger than the ego because it is not time bound. Those who fight the soul will experience more and more physical and emotional stress problems throughout their lives; the soul may be stronger but the ego is stubborn because it is fighting for its little short life. Saturn wants us to live though our soul, (all the planets do) and it will shake up our lives terribly if we are straying too far from our true calling. If the ego wins this round, people may develop anxiety illnesses and could resort to prescription medications to stay in line.

My Saturn return was such a shake up and my symptoms were so intense, I wasn’t sure if I was fit for this world. It was during that time that I reached out to a force higher than myself and said those timeless words “show me what you want me to do.” It was very soon after that my first healer showed up, I went to my first yoga class, and met my first shamanic teacher. Things had gotten pretty bad as I had been in serious survival denial during my 10 years of university in my 20s. My soul was having none of it, and since I didn’t have kids or a regular job, I didn’t have to hold some ego structure together for anyone else (but I did fight anyway). But the fight is exhausting and so I began to slowly surrender to my soul.

Since then I have seen many similar experiences with others: intense emotional pain, life not working out, schizophrenic like behaviours, major physical accidents, illnesses like cancer, substance abuse, and an overwhelming creative longing to live differently. In a shamanic calling these episodes can also be accompanied by shocking experiences of the other world such as visitations by the dead or frightening clairvoyant moments (this was my experience and many others). Such experiences can take a person out, and that is exactly what they are trying to do. But then what?

Well, if you need to stabilize, you may choose to go on medications to normalize your system, but remember that this won’t take the calling away, it just numbs it out for a while. The soul is smart and it will come back for you. Thank goodness we are made this way. Because like it or not, we are meant to live from the soul not the ego. The ego is the helper of the soul -the passenger, supporter, and nurturer. The ego helps the soul take flight in the normal world.

Living a soulful life doesn’t mean that you have to give up your family and day job, unless your job is soul killing! But it may ask you to change a lot about who you thought you were. This is a good thing. I love this topic so I’m going to write more on it in the future.

In short, a spiritual calling is usually quite bumpy and difficult. If you resist, it will get more difficult. Something is being asked of you. Something you can’t know about until you take the first step towards it. Its asking you to surrender and be OK with not knowing.

Perhaps your first step is taking a yoga class or going to a homeopath to get your health figured out like mine was. It may also look like taking a shamanic class to venture deep into soul territory. I am opening up my year long practitioner training until June 20th. If this sounds like it might connect you to your calling, please read more on my events page and get in touch. I’d love to talk with you! Everyone should have the chance to answer their soul and right now my practitioner training is at a very good price!

On the Wheel of the Year we now leap into our faith and hope. Although we are entering three hard months of cold and darkness, the sun is reborn on the Solstice. Day by day she emerges through the dark veils of winter, and after the Spring Equinox the sun retakes centre stage for her grand performance. Yule reminds us of this cycle; we fill our homes with evergreens and candles to celebrate the returning of the light.

The Winter Solstice affords us a chance at rebirth, leaving the previous year behind to create a new one from our dreams and desires. This in between time holds much magic, if we allow ourselves to be in tune with the earth and our place in it. Sit with what is, listen to the earth, and carve out a bit of soft slow time.

Allowing. Forgiving. Letting go. 

And calling on our own expression of spirit to flow through.

 Your expression maybe art, playing with your children, singing, or caring for your home. Maybe it’s writing letters for environmental and social justice, or hugging your favourite trees. Perhaps you light candles and pray for peace. You might be tired and want to rest. On the Solstice you will be joining hundreds, thousands, or even millions of others all over the planet in this ritual of remembering.

Yule is my time of art making, divination, altar creation, walks on the earth, and candlelight meditation. As I sip evergreen tea I feel the closeness of the winter spirits, and the ancestors of Yule.

To accompany your midwinter ritual, I offer you this prayer: may it feel fully embodied, timeless, sacred. May you have your breath, and your body, and be inspired to tend to what is most holy in your life.

Solstice Blessings

I am sitting in my studio this morning writing the 3rd draft of my blog, not happy with the other two I’d wrote in previous weeks. They were fine, but not quite what I wanted to say.

What am I doing this fall? Deep work. So many things are pressing my buttons I feel like an elevator. Mars retrogrades aren’t good for Aires, we like to be on top and ahead of things. Delays, crossroads, indirect routes can make us crazy. Patience, acceptance, gratitude, and surrender, are a daily routine to keep my fire smooth and light. The other fine practice I have added to my daily repertoire is forgiveness.

FORGIVENESS.

Don’t we love to be forgiven? What a feeling that is, when you make a boo boo and the other lets it go. Wow, so much stress instantly evaporates. I realized in this self reflective atmosphere that I need to forgive more, and more. Not just daily but for things that happened years ago, when I hadn’t accumulated the wisdom I have now. A lot of it is self forgiveness, but there are others to forgive too. Consciousness is a path that is earned through hard work and going against the status quo, which means there is probably a lot in all our pasts that need to be forgiven. I can already feel a knot in my stomach loosening, from less than a week of daily forgivenesses. Just to remind of the obvious, forgiveness never means that harm done is OK, it means that we are letting the energy attachment go. We are releasing the karmic bond of hurt. The action can still be wrong, but we are no longer in bondage with it. THAT is freedom.

How I am forgiving? There are many excellent letting go practices and I’ve tried a lot of them over the years. My least favourite is the modern version of Ho’oponopono, although I’ve gone through a more traditional ceremony and that is very effective. What I find works the best is a mix of intention, visualization, emotion, movement, voice, breath, and Spirit. Reenacting the experience and feeling all the terrible feelings in a sacred circle of loving ancestors and offering up the betrayal as a gift to the collective is an act of love. When we let the energy go, we are giving the energy back into the universe, so it is a gift to everyone living. I like to use gestures, dance, mudras, EFT, QiGong, mantras as part of the ritual. Lots of feeling, action, and sound. I also incorporate flower essences. I have created a strong mix of willow, sage, and Mariposa lily for general forgiving, and depending on where the the specific betrayal resides in my body I may add other flowers.

Sometimes a forgiveness practice will indicate that a confrontation with the other person is needed. I still recommend doing the private work first to release as much emotional charge as you can. But when it comes down to it, so much of this work is about forgiving ourselves.

Many Blessings
Beth

We are in a cycle of 3 eclipses right now. One happened Friday, the next will be June 20th and the next July 5th. These are chaotic mutable times. Good necessary change is happening although it might look and feel horrible. A light is finally being shone on White Supremacy, finally. I have been in discussions all week with my online business community and we are experiencing messy, uncomfortable awakening. Those who think things should stay as they are, or that everyone should just get along and move on, will be left out. As I said in a post last week, “THIS is what Awakening looks like”. It’s not all Love and Light, and it’s not pretty.

If you don’t know what to do right now, just listen. Read books, go on websites, explore what is being asked of you by the Black community. Silence is truly no longer an option, but you need to know the facts.

I am reading White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and a fellow business classmate and I both noticed how it is like a portal for white people to finally enter into. Robin is a fabulous writer and she just says it in a way that lands. Next on my list is Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad. These are the books that the Black people in my community want me to read. I am ashamed to not have even heard of them before a few weeks ago. And that’s what is called White privilege!

But also with all these eclipses and planets in retrograde, I must remind you to take care of yourselves. Get lots of rest, don’t try to push yourself into the world, because the world might not be ready yet. Surrender to the backwards current, not politically but energetically! Let yourself flow with the waves of feeling, lie on summer grass, float in cold water, breathe the cleanest air you’ve breathed in decades and pray. Pray for a world with clean air and water for all, for a world that no longer recognizes White as Standard, for a world that upholds dignity, respect, and sovereignty above regulations and conformity. A world where all people have access, not just those who bought their way to entitlement. Did you know that 90% of Nova Scotia coastline now is privately owned? Now this summer, after people have suffered in their homes for months, where are they going to go to get relief? People just think, oh it’s the way it is. But it’s not. Accessing the ocean needs to be there for all. This is called honoring the needs of all people. And animals! This is just one example, but we let things slip by us here, and we can’t keep doing that. There is so much work to do to set things right.

But please remember to Read, listen, educate. And get more rest than you are used to. Self care is essential in times like these. If you are looking for some spiritual/energetic self care tips please come to my Divine Flow class on Zoom this Saturday. We will be doing breathing practices, guided journeys, and lots of herbal and witchy tips to keep your body/mind/spirit running smoothly.

Blessed Be
Beth