God is change and God is love.
The reason why I’m calling Love Exalted my magnum opus (so far) is because my whole life is devoted to love. All of my most challenging and beautiful lessons have been about love and what separates us from it.
When my father could no longer be in my life and our family finally completely fell apart, I feel like I began a quest to understand the root of wounding so I could know how to protect and preserve love. I wanted my family to last forever, but there was too much pain and the organism needed to transform. It felt like death but that was love, too.
That was when the south node was in pisces and the north node in virgo. Now the north node is in pisces and the south node is in virgo (the first eclipse here is in 2 weeks!). Mars had just been retrograde then, too. Venus would soon be retrograde in aries, like it is 8 years later as of today.
It’s been nine years of finding my way back home to love.
I looked for home in identity politics and cancel culture and fell into the wound of (dis)belonging. I looked for home in other peoples magic and practices and fell into the wound of forgetting that healing is a non-dualistic process.
I looked for home in romantic relationships and fell into the wound of separation because I abandoned my own humanity and divinity.
I looked for home with spiritual teachers and fell into the wound of aloneness because I wouldn’t compromise my sovereignty. I looked for home in my pain body and fell into the wound of being fed up with what I wouldn’t let myself feel and how long that made it take to heal.
I looked for home in shamanic communities and fell into the wound of distrust because there was dogma and control there, too.
Finally, I looked for home in my relationship to reality itself and I found God already there and waiting for me to remember that I have always been home within myself.
To be devoted to love is to be devoted to change.
If and when I was willing to change, every time I fell into a wound became a catalyst for falling more deeply in love with myself and the world. I began to see how every wound was the result of getting stuck in the felt sense of separation from love.
That’s really the bottom line.
Love is not the freedom from but the inclusion of pain. The beautiful thing is that loving your pain eases it, which creates more freedom for you to experience different realities. Pain changes you. When we resist change is when we reinforce the feeling of being separate from love.
Resistance gives us a sense of control because it slows everything down; but this is a dangerous game to play with life because with time, the flow can appear to stop altogether. Then we feel further from love than ever and experience reality as harsh, difficult, and like it’s something we have to make happen. This leads to frustration, disappointment, bitterness, and anger.
Just recognizing that the feeling of separation from love is an illusion can be enough to begin rebuilding the connection to love, thereby transforming yourself from a state of despair into one of exaltation.
Every state is temporary, but the more we can strengthen our connection to the state of being in love the more of an effect it has on our reality.
That is the purpose of being devoted to love: to experience real, lasting change in yourself and your relationship to all things, especially other beings.
LOVE EXALTED IS MY REAL LIFE
The life I live now is my testimony for The Church of Love Exalted. In being willing to fall in love with my wounds, I uncovered the hidden beauty and perfection of love (tikkun olam). I realized underneath every wound, personal and collective, is a desire for love to be revealed and restored. Desire is the root of every dream— and of every wound.
My life is guided by desire (and grace) and because of that I have been able to transform what I’ve learned about wounding into the energy to create my dream reality.
Nine years ago I was in deep pain, forced to leave my childhood home with my devastated mother, working three jobs with an undiagnosed spinal injury, writing monthly horoscopes, and being activated everyday by the collective reactionary response to the socio-political landscape.
If you haven’t done the math yet, nine years ago was 2016.
At the time, I could barely imagine what my life would be now but I knew there was more than just suffering. I refused to embrace nihilism, although I flirted with it as every worldbuilder does during initiation.
I called myself Lady Phoenix on tumblr (🥲) because I believed I had the power to rise from the ashes over and over again and change my life. I wasn’t really focused on the how, I just kept listening for the resonance of love. I followed it no matter what, even when it uncovered more wounding.
I was, and still am, f*****g relentless about the revolution of love and thank god I had the discipline (and ancestral guidance) to start with myself.
Apocalypse means to uncover. Part of me understood that apocalypse was a gift. My tagline was actually “astrology for apocalypse” for a few years when I was focused on providing backline support for people connected to socio-political movement.
I changed it eventually because it didn’t feel right to keep receiving “save me” energy but looking back I realize how what I was really talking about was revealing the hidden beauty and perfection of creation throughout time.
Tikkun Olam.
Love Exalted.
After a harrowing decade full of loss and crisis my little family, my mother and brother, are alive and more well every year. We’ve even expanded our unit to include precious chosen family members. I have beautiful intimate relationships with the most open hearted men I’ve ever encountered, including one I want to become a real life mami with.
I have an incredible support team for my physical healing that ensures I’m no longer choosing to neglect that area of my life just to survive.
I live in the apartment of my dreams, overlooking an ancient river that holds me together every f*****g day. I have friendships with evolutionary beings and am blessed to show up everyday asking myself how I can be of service to evolutionary beings all over the Earth.
Doing readings and writing monthly horoscopes became teaching original workshops and programs, mentoring, and becoming the prolific writer I always wanted to be.
I now experience an amount of peace, protection, and beauty in my life that I’m still learning to fully let in and appreciate because it often seems so unreal it makes me suspicious, after what the majority of my life was. Whether I believe it every day or not, it is still here because it is a real and rooted result of my devotion to letting love transform me.
And there’s so much more to come.
Because love is infinite and life is unlimited.
This installment concludes the Love Exalted series. Thank you for being readers through this month long ritual preparation. May it continue to move and touch you, inspiring you to fall in love with your humanity and exalt in your divinity.
The live Venus retrograde ritual where I will guide you through your own process of applying the transmutational lens of the planetary ancestors to your life begins in a week, on Friday March 7th. The doors close in 3 days, on Wednesday March 5th.
You can now locate the entire series under the Love Exalted tab on the main page.
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