Yin & Darkness Medicine

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Dear beautiful… you are not pure, good, or righteous… but you are perfect.

This year, may we ditch the ritualistic fixing-as-escape from our voracious full-body “yes” on who is here, now. That instead of resolutions… we devote ourselves to presence. Fully alive in our bodies, deserving of love, relishing the delicious mundane details of our in-the-moment incarnation… not thinking, but feeling, through our gut and heart and skin and eyes and tastebuds and vibration… unafraid of the vast range of our emotions and sensations. From this place, we always know just what to do - this is where we source our best “resolve”.

Imperial clock time breeds the idea that we should always be improving, progressing, developing… always escaping from the breathed infinity of what *is*. The smell of the balsam candle. Its dim light glowing into the brugmansia I brought inside during the last cold snap. The comfort of this rumpled warm bed where I write. The ecstasy of being free. To curl up and savor what surrounds us.

And yet… we are creative and visionary beings. Healing is an unfurling towards something different, something better, less obstructed, more vitally expressed. I’m obsessed with this, always expanding, seeking, changing, dying and remaking myself. Can we do this as art? Rather than as repair of broken self? Curious, unattached, intoxicated with the mystery… staying in tender love with all the versions that came before? In alignment with the qi of our earth?

Please, don’t try to change, right now, as we are in the most delectable velvety down-under time of deepest yin, retreat, stillness, gathering and integration. It is the wrong time to cleanse, push forward, decide things. It is listening time. If we have to do something… let us get down to loving our darkest most hidden aspects, just as much as we love the part we are willing to show to the world. Embrace the long dark nights within our own being. The myth of purity and goodness is a religious manipulation to keep us judging our neighbor, keep us disconnected from our whole, complex, light and dark and infinite selves. Keep us punishing ourselves, letting others punish us, for being all that we are.

We aren’t fooled, anymore. The darkness is not evil, bad, or scary. Darkness is food, nourishment, medicine. Yin. Cold. Dense. Heavy. Salty. Primordial.

Last month I sat and listened again, in meditation with herbal medicine - a yin tonic. Outside the window, again, redwoods arching skyward, above forests of moss and lichen on stones, mixing with a bruised grey winter sky. The salty, cold, hyper-nourishing medicine landed in the central fire of my belly, needing cacao and honey so it could be metabolized through the soil of my earth element. Yin tonics are famously hard on the stomach, dense and cold as they are.

In Chinese medicine there are certain known qualities of yin and yang written in the old books. All just theory, until I feel it in my own body. Yin is deeper; more elusive, than blood. Cold. Dark. Salty. Softening, dissolving. Like the deep sea.

Chinese philosophy says that even in the deepest, densest yin, there is always a spark of Yang. Yin, as it sinks in and nourishes, has a penetrating force that is Yang… to receive the nourishment of Yin requires release, and surrender . To allow the density to sink actively into the center of ourselves.

First, came as a sense of being incredibly sleepy, and heavy, and wanting to lie down. This was a tussle, gently, in my mind (oh, the sound of the rain pouring on the roof… so divine)… I should sit up, maybe have some tea to wake me up a bit. I turn to her, my body. She said please, can we lie down. Yes. The books say that the best way to replenish the Yin is to rest.

For the rest of the day into night, yin. A dark room, a soft bed; a heavy blanket. Face up, arms open. Supta baddha konasana. A bolster beneath my sacrum, spine, head, and I was able to deeply relax my body, and melt, and rest. From there, the Yin slowly began to fill me in, like a glacial river with fine glittering silt… dense, heavy, a fine softness in its essence. I could feel the white matter of my body softening, reanimating with substance and moisture. My tendons, ligaments, fascia, felt like they were getting younger. The feeling was extraordinary. From brittle, crumbling, stiff… to supple aliveness. Time going backwards. Healing.

It started in my shoulders, arms, scapulae… then, all around my heart. For the first time in my life, I felt my pericardium. Xin Bao, or “envelope of the heart ” in Chinese medicine. The emotional protector, physically, the white, fibrous casing protecting the heart. Until that moment, an anatomical concept. Until I felt the rigid casing soften… saturate, like stiff leather being oiled back to life. Suddenly in a new way my heart could open; flex; breathe, surge. Turns out it is incredibly relaxing, to open the heart, a sweet relief.

The yin sunk into my spine and animated her snake. Curling, twisting, undulating waves. Not stiff brittle snapping joints anymore. a fluidity, fullness. the fluency of the ocean, as O’Donahue says. To flow, we must be liquified.

Yin, nourishment, additive, sinking in like water in wood, like a burning log into coals, like gelatin into bone, like soft rain into parched earth.

Sinking deeper, there is a direct channel from the velvet jungle of the heart, to the womb. There was revelations around this, as well, but they are a secret…

Yin, down in the dark… invites surrender. the dark, with our eyes useless, the fire of yang no longer able to project or reflect their way to knowing… useless.

It’s all feeling, in the dark, letting go, falling back, trusting the body, the universe, the void. will catch us, always, and show us our path, through sensing, impressions, visions, dreams. Subterranean, where creativity is birthed. fertility is darkness, before the spark, the seed not yet unfurling. The source.

Don’t shy away from the darkness… it will always find you, in the end. And it is so soft and quiet… so rich and magnetic…

The tale of the year of the snake taught me that I want to say yes. To life, to all the aspects of myself, the dark and the light. I have spent my lifetime, saying no, not even realizing it, rebelling and resisting against the excruciating pain and delectable gorgeousness of all of it. I don’t know about you, but I am sick of shying away from everything within myself that is not pleasant and unoffensive. There are brilliant shining gems in the darkness. I want them all.

I’m not going to wish you a new year where you have nothing but abundance and ease and everything you think you want. That will set you up for failure. Years are alive, they rise and fall, we get what we need, from the divine orchestration, and the lessons come in all the ways.. I’m going to wish that you have a new year where you say yes, to your ugliest manifestations as well as your most radiant masterful beauty and charm. We cannot have one without the other.

…and I will say goodnight, with sweet blessings of Yin to you all 🖤

Dad! uncles, formal gentlemen, pious women, gentle acquaintances… please stop 🛑 reading now (I’m looking out for you)

this last section is sacred bloody woman stuff 🩸☠️🩸

to you, the pagan edge-dwelling woman (or rare womb-entranced, elk-horned man)

I have been devoted to exploring and teaching women’s practices for decades now, starting with “womb listening” in my late 20s. I’ve been tracking the threads of so many of our buried mysteries… menstruation, birth, psychic abilities, innate matriarchal biology, past lifetimes burned at the stake, sexual healing. The last few years I have been drawn to bring women together to talk about what I have been finding. I teach classes in moon lodges at gatherings, and share individually with women in clinic, but I need a more steady place to connect.

It does not feel appropriate to share these niche, personal stories here in Animist Alchemy. So I finally created a writing space where I don’t have to hold back…

where I will talk about the secret feral ways I am studying, in service to restoring the depth and power of the feminine, personally and collectively.

It will be paid access, because I don’t want just anyone to wander in - I’ll be writing about tender, vulnerable, secret things. Ideally you are more than curious. You are magnetized. You *need* this space in your life. You seek healing here.

Here is the discount to access the Electric for $13 per year:

Subscribe to the Electric

Men, you are welcome to subscribe if you are on the path of humbly worshipping the raw bloody mysteries of the female species. We really do need you, love you.

Women, I’ve got things to tell… things you’ll want to hear, and play with, and talk about. To birth the wild, untamed, self-possessed and ecstatically vital beings that are sparking just under our surface.

Embodied womb practices, obsidian eggs, ceremonial plant medicine, poetics, dream & trip reports, messy & clean relationship alchemy, shadow play, erotica, radical self responsibility. Resources. Guest writings from other felines on the journey. I’m no expert… just a forever-young, dirt-and-vetiver-scented hyper-sensitive feral gypsy explorer of this sacred carnal vessel… fucking around, finding out, and telling the tale. And a lure… I want to draw out your tales, too.

Because I truly believe that as we remember our way out of ancient patriarchal trances and reanimate our nature-connected, body-based feminine hyperpowers - I mean, really *live* them - together - we can conjure playfulness, grace, harmony, wisdom and sanctity (back?) into the human realm.

and feel soooo good as we do 🐾

You can find the complete uncut version of my expedition through Yin, as the first post in Woodnymph Electric. Please let me know if you can’t pay and subscribe - or if you *can* get in without paying (no bueno!!) Still working out the kinks (lol, kink). I have no idea what’s going to happen but it is going to be fun. Can’t wait to see who dives in with me...

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