Why Are You Smiling?

This is what my mom asked me when she saw me.

Ah So.

Here I am. Drawn here after a long while. Acknowledging nudges that have been coming for a month now, nudges to write, to share. Nudges to share for me to pause and take in what has been swirling around me for some time.

Yes. I am here. Still here. Still.

Many phases of the moon have passed since my last ‘entry,’ many phases of me have passed since my last ‘entry.’

And here I am. Seated. Writing. Sharing. Drawn here.

Many stories came before I even sat here. Thoughts like, you should write in, fill in the gap between then and now, go through your journal and summarize what has unfolded and occurred in your life that took you, kept you away from writing.

As you can see, I have chosen to ignore those thoughts and meet myself here.

Acknowledging the truth. Yes, there has been a gap. Am marker in between time. A discontinuous event.

Life picked up. Picked up in the sense that I feel like I am only now having my feet touch the ground. I was moving from one thing to the next, one event to the next in quick succession from May until November, really early October when I had an opportunity to travel, but as soon as I came back, I found myself still wrapped up in the speed of doing. Until something got my attention.

Oh, how easy it is to get wrapped up, swirled up, swept up, carried away by the busyness of doing? Oh, how easy it was to become ungrounded and move through the motions, at times mindlessly moving from one thing to the next. Yes, there were moments of quiet and pause. Yes, there were moments of gratitude and delight. Yes, there were moments for me. They were all moments for me. It’s just that I found myself asking what am I valuing, where am I putting my energy, what am I chasing?

This notion of chasing, of giving my energy to, of placing my attention on.

My mind was chasing. It was my mind that was chasing. It had become unruly, unhinged, it felt unstoppable.

Early November is when things started to shift, shifted in a sense where I was beginning to be able to see. This seeing came from a place of feeling and the feeling drove the ability to see.

I presented at a conference and did not ‘get through the slides’ in the allotted time for the session. I miscalculated my timing and was ‘behind.’ The thing is that I was feeling good in the moment, it was only after I realized, by being told the session was ending and another was beginning, that I felt ‘behind.’ And once that door was cracked, all of the other stuff came flooding in - the self sabotaging thoughts, self destructive patterns.

Ironically, this was exactly what I was speaking to in the session. That once we become aware of the patterns/actions/behaviors, once we notice and observe them, then we can do something about them. We can shift our thoughts to more compassionate, nourishing, gentle, loving ways of being and thinking…

That and the power of rest. Rests to reframe. Rests to pause. Rests to take a break from whatever we are engaged in or doing. Time to stop. Undo. Pause.

This is from my journal entry on November 7th

Shame, guilt. Heavy weight of reality. Sleep gives reprieve. Then wake, a small space, gap of ease and then BAM, it floods back and I remember that I feel like shit, full of regret, worry. The reality of what is here based on my choices, the choices that felt right, that I couldn’t control, was unrefined…the weight, the volume, the mass of this is paralyzing. Too much to bear.

The feeling of being wronged, a victim, tired, lack of pleasure, drive, interest is here. Apathetic. Nothing. Little joy. More intolerance, annoyance. Ugh. This weight. Barren- that is how I feel. Bare- stripped bare. Barren, all removed, depleted. Nothing left. Bare- to witness.

You have to be free to be authentic and be ready to make mistake. Mistakes are an essential part of growth. We are all evolutionary beings who make mistakes. Mistakes are nothing but steps in your growth. – Anand Ji

Pain is making room for the unknown. – Anand Ji

I saw Dr. Priyaa today. Like a life line. Cried. Sobbed last night. Feeling questionable and shakey…really unsolid ground. Shre (meant she, but typed shre. Yes, Sri) reminded me that this teaching opportunity came to me. So, there must be learning opportunities, opportunities for growth embedded here.

I can be in pain. I can experience pain. I can witness pain. When I attach, hold it, in a grip, try to make sense and figure it out – I am suffering.

Whats App message sent to a dear friend in 2024

The Great Bear is bowing down. Drinking from the source. Head on the earth.

Screenshot taken from the Star Walk 2 app on November 4, 2025

There was something about naming, outing, letting out how I was feeling. Giving it permission to be, rather than ignoring, turning away from or stuffing it down. Speaking its truth. The realness of what is, rather than denying it or resisting it. Allowing it to be.

Letting myself feel it.

It, meaning whatever it was.

Letting myself feel.

Around this same time, I remembered that when I was younger, I loved frosting on a graham cracker as a snack. I knew we had graham crackers from our recent fire with s’mores and I remembered seeing frosting in the cabinet. Excited with delight for something I haven’t enjoyed in a long while, I gathered the graham crackers and frosting, set them out on the counter and began assembling my treat. When I opened the frosting, it had a weird scent. When I spread it, it had weird consistency. When I tasted it, I spit it out.

Me notcing the date on the frosting.jpeg

Intrigued, I checked the expiration date. May 2017. Yes. No joke. There was frosting in the cabinet so long ago that the expiration date was in 2017. November to be exact.

This got me thinking in a fun way. Oh my, I thought, I am working with energies and patterns, ways of being and thinking that are outdated. Way out of date and old. So old they have expired. Past their prime. Past their recommended date of use. The last date of its effect.

Look at this, for real?!

A date marking expected decline in quality or effectiveness….

I cannot make this up. And what was happening in 2017? A major shake up to life as I knew it. A huge change. One I can look back on now and say with certainly, that it was a marker of a major catalsytic shift, one that has reoriented my life.

Oh my goodness. I knew that Shani Dev was at play here. Scratch that. I knew that Shani Dev was a player here in the sense that I am running a Pratyantar Dasha with Shani (I know of this through my studies of Jyotish). I also know that Shani had been retrograde during this period. Retrogression or varkiri in Sanskrit, means twisted, irregular or ambiguous. Have you ever been in a car, looking out the window at close up to a tire on a car and it looks like it is moving, spinning backwards? You know it is not moving backwards because the car is moving forward, but it still looks like this to you. Retrograde is like this, an optical illusion from our viewpoint on earth in which it looks like the planets are moving backwards, it appears like it is moving in the opposite direction but it isn’t. This is the energy of a retrogression or retrograde.

And I can see how Shani Dev was playing. This is how this energy plays. This illusion. I am seeing this for the first time like this, experiencing this for the first time like this. This relentless energy, stops at nothing, pulls out all the stops until I see is a play. An illusion. A head game. What I used to call a mind fuck, until BeLoved Lyn encouraged me to be more kind and use enigma instead, which is exactly what it is. I was feeling held back, confused. Unsure.

Saturn went into retrograde motion back in July and this paired with the Dahsa I am running in addition to Mercury turning retrograde and the current energy of the planets in my chart has all of this swirling, like the red storm at the top of Jupiter, which by the way is changing, squeezing and fluctuating, speeding up and slowing down. It is not as stable or a fixed feature as once thought, kind of like what I am experiencing.

From NASA’s Goddard Hubble observations of Jupiter’s Storm wobbling, speeding up/slowing down, shrinking in size, yet getting taller and more circular. Posted on You Tube, October 9, 2024

Oh Shanichraya, the slow moving, relentless one who shows up to undo, dissolve and dismantle all that no longer serves.

Things that have been known and reoccurring, fixed and considered stable have been slowing undoing… I am reminded of the quote

The gift of pain is the reorientation of your values, of what you value. – Anand Ji

Which brings me to now (this was written on December 2, 2025)

Last night as I turned over, adjusting the covers on my bed I was greeted by a bright, bright light. I slowly opened my eyes to see Chandra Ma, the Moon herself shining, bathing me in her light. The light she is not holding on to, rather reflecting and sharing back to the earth. The light of the sun, which is out of view during the night on earth. Bathed in the radiant, healing light of the moon. I allowed this bliss, this delight. I allowed myself to receive and then BAM, my mind jumped in and took over the moment with thoughts, You are not going to be here during the full moon, since you will be away. You will be missing out on this healing energy, this opportunity to receive the light of the moon, the gaze of the moon.

I had to really reign my mind in, it had gone as far as rewriting my plans for Thursday night…..

Eventually I fell asleep, allowing the moon to set to the west behind the trees. When I woke, I wrote this:

Woke. Stretched and saw a bright light. Chandra Ma gazing upon me. Shining her reflective light on me as I rest in bed. Surprised. Delighted. Grateful. Humbled. Ah So. My whole bed was illuminated by her rays, then BAM – the realization that I wouldn’t be in bed on Thursday or Friday for her fullness – and my mind went, it went to all that isn’t, wont’ be. I caught this desire, pull to the dark side of lack and without. And am reminded that this time of year is when the moon shines on me as I sleep and I can see her fullness as she ‘sets’ in the western sky. It really is a gift, inviting me to be grateful for what is here, now.

Clarity comes. It always does. Writing in my journal and writing here leaves traces of my learning processes. I seem to always want during the spaces when all that surrounds feels ‘cloudy, hazy, smokey.’ It seems like whatever I am feeling will never end - these moments of confusion, where self doubt, self sabotage and self destruction breed, they appear to thrive here, in this uncertain environment.

Sometimes I am learning that when clarity comes, it flows through me and I can write it out. I am finding though, that just because it arrives or my mind becomes still and can see, my body takes some time to catch up. It’s like it hasn’t been absorbed or integrated. Not yet embodied. Maybe that is the work when I say to align body and mind.

It is as if it slips through my fingers, unable to grasp. Not tangible long enough to get a hold on. And this is the stuff I want to hold on to. Maybe that is why I like to write, to I can leave a trace of its arrival, the space in which it came to form, the nascent time when it began, it’s earliest stages of becoming a part of me or me becoming a part of it again, returning, remembering to the larger truth of this all. To grow. To learn. To be.

With this, I leave this entry from November 18th, when clarity came before I came around to embodying it fully….

I allow things to take a hold of me. I allow memories, feelings, fear, worry- unanticipated events, moments that feel uncomfortable to have a hold on me.

Hold. Grip.

Noticing that some stuff feels hard, hard to bear, to feel, to sit with and be or not, not even sit with, to flow through. It hurts, immensely hurts to feel some pain, grief, sadness.

It hurts to hurt.

And when I allow the hurt to stay, when I pull up a chair and begin reasoning Why are you here? What message are you sending? Why me? Why now? What did I do to deserve this? When I allow, when I invite the mind to step in and analyze – it’s a trap- the mind then acts as a vice grip- holding on with all of its might to try – to do what it does best – to try to make sense of what is happening, unfolding – all the consequences, choices that I did wrong, messed up on, that have led me to this very moment of intensely, extremely, unpleasantness that I want to go away, not feel, avoid, to have it end, stop.

And this is where I meet suffering. Suffering cannot live with love – it replaces it, snuffs it out, dampens it, hides, it, obscures it.

Suffering is the work of the mind.

Suffering is using all of its might to overpower love

The very love that is driving this hurt, pain, loss, and grief to be felt- allowing it, inviting it to move, to unlock, unfreeze, to move freely and this pain, hurt, grief of loss is so intense it has been building with each ignoring, stuffing away- all the times I’ve said I don’t have time, don’t’ want to feel – it’s too much.

And love persists- this love to

liberate,

unshackle,

unbind,

untangle,

dissolve,

transmute

It is here.

Not to be ignored- to be used to transform, especially the anger.

The tears that have dried me out, vast, barren landscape, the sobs and wails that have me sighing and gasping for breath, for air.

These are the elements of catalyst.

And the mind wants them to stay the same, to remain.

This is how strong and powerfueled my mind is. It’s tendency to create illusion, delusion, confusion, doubt. It sends thoughts to cause me to second guess, to wish I did, said something different- fueled by the “wrong” – you made the wrong choice. Look at you now- you fuck up, always messing up, can’t get it right. A waste. A problem. A looser.

This is its power, the power it yields to control- self sabotage, self destruction, self diminishing – having me second guess my place, value, worth, my voice, expression.

My very being.

The shadow side haunts us.

The shadow side hunts.

Not alone, but on my own.

Exploring leading myself, going in on my own.

I can choose, to lead myself, to carry myself through these darkest days of the year.

Weathered Woman of the Diamond Blade... born around loom and fire, wind, air and waves. I am ready to walk into the frozen, barren landscape from a place of LOVE to meet, to hunt my shadow.

The time is now, it is ripe for discovery, for awe, for wonder, for humility.

The sword to cut. To soften.

To be humble and grateful.

To carry myself in Love.

No longer depending on other’s words to guide, as guides to carry me through, to arrive at a destination, to compare.

The feeling of comparison is there, here – experiences over mine,

Experiences of others at times, I allow to overpower,

to drown out my own experiences.

Called to go in alone, on my own. Not that I am alone. I am not.

Alone, on my own, meaning no one can do it for me.

If I want it, I have to show up. Commit. Show I am committed. Devoted to growth, to evolution.

To me.

To show I am committed to me.

Physically. Sensorily. Spiritually. Mentally.

Tending to me.

This is why I am smiling.

This awareness.

Harnessing my power.

Me. Alone. On my own.

But never alone.

Here is to the journey,

Sara