Soul Food for these times

Perspectives for clarity, coherence, and aliveness now

On 8/8 I received five emails with different perspectives that are clarifying, grounding, and important to help me have balance, higher vision, and purpose, and make sense of the challenging times we’re living through. These are just some examples of the “soul food” I nourish myself with regularly. If I miss my “daily dose”, I can tell it.

Sharing this kind of soul food is also necessary for me in order to nourish our larger community and collective consciousness as part of my Cultural Butterfly Project’s https://www.culturalbutterflyproject.com/ mission of “Weaving a world of well-being for all in a life-aligned culture of right relationships with a future worth living into.”

Here are some excerpts--some “threads”--from each of these “soul food” emails that I’m offering you now to help weave a new “tapestry”, a new paradigm, a new reality for our world.

#1: The Harmonic Self: Why Frequency is the New Identity, Julie Krull. Below are some excerpts from her email. I highly recommend her full article.

This week, I wrote about the Harmonic Self—

the radiant frequency beneath identity

that is yours alone to embody.

Because in a world of labels and projections,

it’s easy to forget that you’re not here to “find” yourself.

You’re here to resonate as yourself.

And that resonance is what the world is waiting for.

You are not a concept.

You are a current.

You are not a construct.

You are a chord of truth.

Let the old names fall away.

Let the noise fade.

Let your soul sing again—

clear, resonant, true.

You are not here to fit in.

You are here to tune the world.

Three Reminders from the Harmonic Self

1. You are not becoming someone. You are becoming a tone.

Your presence is the transmission.

2. When you stop performing, your true frequency begins to sing.

Not louder—truer.

3. Identity isn’t static—it’s symphonic.

You are a living instrument in the orchestra of the Whole.

#2: Beyond the Mask, Beneath the Spell, Angell Deer. Some selected excerpts:

To shapeshift is to remember that the self was never meant to be static, that our edges are invitations to meet the world more intimately. . . .

The old ways knew that to enter the altered state was an act of devotion, of risk, of trust in Spirit. It was not something done casually or without guidance. It was shaped by elders who could hold the thread of your becoming while you stepped into the great unknown. It was bound in prayer, tethered to the village, grounded in reciprocity so that when you returned from the dream or the vision, you carried something for the people. The altered state was never an escape from the real world; it was a journey into the deeper world, the one beneath the visible, so that you could return with medicine for the visible one.

Without that tending, without that thread of belonging, we still shapeshift, but the hands guiding the transformation may belong to forces that neither love us nor know our names. There is a great danger in shapeshifting without the cord tied to something older and wiser than the moment—because then the change is not in service to the soul, but to the machinery of hunger.

To live awake now requires . . . courage to step out of the consensus trance, to notice the spells being woven into us every day, to refuse to wear shapes that hollow us out. It is the courage to sit in the stillness where no algorithm is curating your attention, where no headline is telling you who you are. . . .

To step out of the trance not just in rebellion, but in reverence for life, for truth, for the more-than-human kin who still remember your real name.

Perhaps the most necessary act of magic now is not the dramatic transformation, but the quiet slipping free from the shapes the world insists upon, until the shape you wear is the one that was dreamed for you by the Earth herself . . .

#3: "Borderless Belonging”, Voices of Emergence. Some selected excerpts:

. . . navigating the paradox of being both insider and outsider.

. . . not just the physical exile of migration, but the subtler forms of spiritual and cultural exile many of us carry. And she names with clarity the emotional labour it takes to reclaim belonging in a world that still privileges whiteness, patriarchy, and the rational mind.

“Our systems often reward performance and perfectionism over presence. But the body doesn’t lie. It remembers where we feel safe - and where we don’t.”

. . . feminine energy, not as soft power, but as sacred intelligence. . . . This isn’t performative spirituality - it’s lived mysticism, shaped by daily discipline and deep devotion.

. . . sovereignty isn’t about independence - it’s about interdependence.

. . . the larger cultural field - what’s cracking, what’s composting, and what’s quietly emerging beneath the rubble.

. . .  a testament to what becomes possible when we lead from liminality. When we embrace the edgewalkers, the shapeshifters, the ones who carry stories between worlds.

. . . belonging isn’t a status - it’s a practice. Something we cultivate through embodiment, through relationship, through remembering.

“Emergence begins when we let go of needing to be understood - and choose to be felt instead.”

In a world obsessed with certainty, Samina models something more potent: spiritual presence without pretense. Feminine power without apology. And a fierce commitment to co-creating futures rooted in remembrance.

#4: "Fierce with Reality”, Parker Palmer. Some selected excerpts:

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done...you are fierce with reality.” —Florida Scott-Maxwell 

Florida Scott-Maxwell was in her eighties when she wrote those words . . .

. . .  At thirty, animated by a heartfelt but risky vision of the work I felt called to do, I’d made vocational decisions that had landed me in the wilderness, where neither a coherent sense of purpose nor economic security seemed within reach.

. . . Today, at age 86, now that I’ve had more practice at being human, I realize that I was a reasonably normal person back then—a conflicted but well-intended soul who yearned to be whole.

. . . naming, claiming and embracing the whole of who we are, our shadow as well as our light, is easier said than done. . . .

For me it meant walking into and through the shame I felt about being forty-plus and still not having figured out how to live . . .

Now, as I approach the end of my journey not in despair but deeply in love with life, I know for a certainty that Scott-Maxwell was right. Wholeness does not mean perfection—it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.

Whole is how I feel when I’m able to show up in the world as I am, owning everything I got wrong as well as what I got right.

How can we learn to embrace the whole of who we are, embrace it with love and self-forgiveness, saying to ourselves and others, “Yes, I am all of the above”?

. . . three things that have made a difference for me.

. . . script dialogues between my inner voice of self-judgment and “the voice of true self,”

. . . the process of going deeper into myself morphed into a way of getting objective distance on myself.

. . . Eventually, as a writer, I felt called to go public with some of my struggles, but that took time. I needed to integrate the darkness into my sense of self before I could offer my story up in ways that might be helpful to others. . . .

I can't think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as my true self—the self that is, ultimately, the only gift I have to offer. I want to move toward that day with the knowledge that, as best I knew how, I showed up here without disguise, able to engage the world in freedom and with love because I had become fierce with reality.

#5: “The turning point of the Lions Gate and Aquarius Full Moon is more powerful than you can know”, Star Sister Astrology.  These selected excerpts are only from her 8/8/25 email newsletter. They are not posted on her website.

So many of us now seem caught in some version of an impossible situation. The old energy structures of reality itself no longer seem inadequate to hold the new energy that's pouring in. What I'm getting from the astrology . . . is that our invitation is to hold the energy for the new. To let our heart- and soul-based vision become the new structure by which we live – moment by moment, as we choose how to respond to all that is arising now. 

It's a co-creative process, not a mechanical one -- and as these glitches and disasters cause cracks and collapses in the old structures, they're creating space for the new to come in. . . .

. . . By Saturday morning’s  Aquarius Full Moon, the  energy will have become even more coherent . . . a rare pattern called an “envelope.” Known as a container for creatively resolving conflict, it’s an invitation to seriously uplevel the alchemical quality of our living, choosing, relating, doing, praying, and dreaming. . . .

. . . Beneath the surface, reality is not only changing -- it's looking for the transformative space it needs now. . . . That space is your heart and your mind . . .”

These all speak to the question “Who are you being?” instead of “What are you doing?” I see connections, “cross-weaving”, and some threads of a larger, higher, more life-aligned paradigm and vision among and between them. Do you? I’d love to hear about it. Just hit reply and let me know.