Capture by Casea Rose
Note: All words are mine and my own experience, which isn't personal to you. I have seen clearly how everything is my projected reality and that I take full responsibility for every aspect of my experience, choices and perceptions.
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My journey is not just my own. It is the journey of so many that come before me. Generations of women and men in their journey as human beings, in these physical bodies, incarnated souls here on a mission.
I share vulnerably my story in the hopes that it will inspire those on their own heroic journey across the world. I will be sharing this as a series in this journey of VESSEL, to stand in my own nakedness so that we all have the courage to face ourselves honestly before we move through the gates of transformation.
Our nervous systems and cellular memory is encoded with generations of trauma, deep stress, anxiety, fear, chronic illnesses, sexually-transmitted diseases. For those who are ready, we are in a profound process of re-parenting ourselves. Learning how to tend to these vessels is an indigenous skill that as a culture we are at risk of completely losing. Having the deep awareness of the deep nutrients our bodies need to balance and heal themselves, and create lifestyles that support their natural vital process.
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My relationship to the word VESSEL was destined from the minute I was born.
The word “vessel” literally is what my name “Ting” means in the I Ching. It is Hexagram #50, meaning:
“Ritual tripod vessel or cauldron used to contain abundant nourishment for the gathering of wise men.”
When I read this, my jaw nearly dropped. My whole life made sense in one sentence.
I am an avid student of the Gene Keys system as well, and the key #50 also means the Divine Order of the “gathering of the Illuminati”, and the harmonic equilibrium of the Nature of Self-Organizing Intelligence.
This is what I was born for. To gather the new leaders birthing the new paradigm, the new Sacred World, with high discernment of virtues, with spacious order, and with supreme grace and beauty.
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We create what is our medicine. From my observations during my life so far, this is a sacred law of the creatively spiritual path.
My journey with this vessel I’ve been given has been the most difficult dimension of my entire life. Coming in, I always knew who I was and why I was here. There was little doubt in my mind. However, I lived most of my life completely out of my body. I constantly had bruises on my legs, stains on my shirt, hair disheveled. My mother was herself quite sensitive, and had some pretty major health challenges, from mild arthritis to high blood pressure and nearly blind eyesight. For that reason, she was particularly aware of healthy diet and lifestyle and made sure that we ate lots of green vegetables, fish and rice. In fact, sugar and gluten were rare in my household, and I was very fortunate to have eaten a more indigenous diet since being small, and had a resilient immune system from eating dirt in my back yard, and backpacking to Asia and eating a varied diet of street food and animal parts that gave a deeper sense of nutrition.
However, as a child I started to rebel and wanted to fit into the American diets of my peers, eating white pancakes and sugary cereals for breakfast, and hamburgers and pizza that contained zero nutrition. I would binge on sweet and chips after school, and bake pastries so I could indulge in sweets. It was both a passion for baking but a sweet rebellion against my roots. I used food as the way to soothe the depression and anxiety I started to feel at age 10, the heaviness of the world and my inability to do anything about it.
I started to struggle with my weight at a young age. I was always bigger boned from my dad’s thicker, Irish build, and so there was deep shame and self-hate starting in middle school when I compared myself with the other girls in my class, most of who were petite Asian girls. Growing up without a TV also made me feel embarrassed and out of touch in school, unable to follow the reference points of celebrities and TV shows. I felt like an outsider, and my size also made me feel less desirable and able to visually fit in.
And then, there was competition with my older sister who often people mistook us for being twins. She was much more athletic and competitive than me, playing on the varsity tennis team and one of the top swimmers on the varsity swim team. I always felt slow and steady, and didn’t have a competitive bone in my body. Sports never made sense to me; I was much more drawn to the subtle fluid arts like dance, yoga, hiking and figure skating. Yet the story I told myself was that I wasn’t athletic, fit or strong enough to do those things.
In many ways, everything comes full cycle. I am returning to this aspect of my childhood and imprinted values. The indigenous diet my mother raised me on is exactly what my nutritionist has prescribed for me. I am coming back to the kind of movements that feel good for me, and I am supplementing them with high-intensity strength training and running to remind myself of how strong I actually am, to re-write those stories.
As a young adult starting at 18 to 25, I started partying and traveling intensively, which meant eating out, doing drugs, drinking and smoking. It was the years of experimentation, indulging in life’s pleasures, doing “what I wanted” in the immature sense so that I could numb myself from the depression and also hide my power. I didn’t let anyone really know who I was and what I was capable of, my deeper intelligence. It was about tasting all the flavors, pushing all my edges. I’d stay up late, pull all nighters, not give a crap about the quality of sleep and follow my “bliss.” And then, I started working super intensely — running my own business, which meant high financial stress and being “always on”, which quickly led to getting burnt out and creatively dry. I had 4 major romantic relationships in a row which were working through my shadows. The birth control started and all the energetic imbalances in my relationship manifested as major hormonal imbalances and pain in my womb — sharp pains, cramping, yeast infections, UTIs, missed periods, losing sensitivity, lower libido. I was completely disconnected my cycle and womb, and therefore wasn’t able to receive any messages from her on my YES and NO. The shame that I felt inside continued to dig a deeper hole, as I continued to compare myself to other women my age and in the media that I felt inadequate to.
From 25 to 28 I was able to find more stability in my home in the mountains and trees, and a deeper belonging to real community. I consciously began to shift friend groups to a much more conscious and aligned community. However, my work was still deeply unhealthily and tied to the Factory community, whose ethos were about over-working, highly cerebral and strategic, and extractive and highly depleting. With my consulting and love for travel with Carson, we were on the road every 4-5 days, and not grounded in any practices. I started gaining weight, vertigo, hormonal volatility and major thyroid and adrenal depletion. Even though I started eating healthier and cooking, yet the consciousness of “not good enough” kept running its script, and nothing I did was ever good enough.
And finally in the last year since last September, I started a series of extreme cleansing and diets, where I shocked and irritated my system further with too much change, too fast, and not enough consistency. I did a month of juicing, bone broths, two times a day coffee enemas and over-supplementation, yet in a period of psychological instability and taking micro-doses of LCD and dealing with deep emotional instability with a new relationship. I was still healing from the year prior of trauma at the root chakra of losing my home, last relationship and death of my identity, with a rejection and intentional disconnection to my community and family to have space. Stepping into the unknown also brings up major primal fears of safety and reptilian consciousness.
Finally, when I moved to Santa Fe in the winter, my body began to decompose and calcify, the bones becoming rigid and my body fatigued and burdened with the high altitude and extreme diets — a strange thing happened. Over only 2 months, I gained about 20 lbs. In my solitude and in the confines on a home exposed to the elements in the middle of the desert, my deep unconcious mind began churning and the mind racing, my OCD and deep neurosis that were never addressed kicked in. I started to experience a sequence of intense symptoms, such as insomnia, hypothyroidism, missing periods, headaches and faintness. The intensity of the spirits and exposure to the desert elementals sometimes left me feeling disassociated and shaky, confused and psychologically very vulnerable.
It has only been since April/May this year (4 months ago) that I have started to feel these symptoms improve and my spirit begin to lift, as a deep remembrance of who I was as a child has begun to return. A slow rebirth, a return to my essence, a falling in love with life again. A commitment to self-love and my body as the vessel, a disciplined practice that is for my highest good, and a reconnection to the community that has held and supported me all along.
And from this place — VESSEL is born.
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Mari is called to Santa Fe in early June. She has a death of her best friend that breaks her down over the last year, and she is called to Santa Fe to create a book to honor her life and her work. Sh rents my home. It has all these weird connections to her childhood home. And then, there is a new love in her life that rents a home down the street for them. She is opening, falling back in love with life. She’s been doing the dark shadow work and now she is ready to be with me.
We are ready to be with each other, as true friends and sisters. We spend an afternoon at my home playing music, drinking tea and talking about collaborations. We see the threads combining, they are undeniable.
We both had been abruptly released from our major projects. In this space of divine grace, we forgive, we love and we plant seeds together — neither one of us holding back, trying to compete, to be separate. We acknowledge our interconnection, our karmic DNA, our shared dharma. We honor it. We share our joy and renewed sense of zest for life! We celebrate the journey.
And we commit to co-creation. We didn’t know what it would be called, but we sensed it needed to emerge from our shared passion for the body and our love for life design.
VESSEL was born that day, and it would take the next few months of our cultivation to birth it.
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We spent a week together in Mexico City, side by side, as deep sisters, working together on this and birthing it together. We talked through the difficulty and really faced each other in our truths. We thoughtfully guided and held the experience for each other, making sure it felt safe, pleasurable and inspiring. We took breaks to share our gifts of embodiment practices, good food and the skills of Gene Keys and divination tools to support our process. We dined and worked in the way that I always dreamed a collaboration could be — spacious, fluid, deeply pleasurable and balanced.
And then, I went into a deep dive with Mariana and Sadie to experience each others magic, to face our shadows and help lift each other higher, to strengthen our bodies and purify our intention. I hosted them in the beautiful home in Tepoztlan for a small creative retreat, and held space for our collective intentions and seeds to manifest into the larger cauldron. We met as equals and in our full potency. Mariana offered her womb healing, and I offered her Gene Keys. Sadie offered her medicine, and I offered her a taste of my world over dinner. Sadie had been shamanic ally called me in, and Mariana shamanic ally showed up to clear my field when I was disturbed by deep unconscious reptilian fears that were still in getting in the way of full trust. And now, I feel more trusting and deeply in alignment than I ever have.
Sadie’s session provided insights into my health journey that I had been searching for months — an intuitive analysis of my blood work that my doctor said “I was normal” and gave me an extensive protocol of expensive supplements rooted in bio-hacking, masculine consciousness. Sadie had all the experience of 30 years of looking t bloodwork, but the deeply rooted, indigenous Mexican shamanic practice that I deeply connected with. And she had specific karma with my soul.
Mariana offered me a tangible experience of simple shamanic practices, a connection to Tantra and herbalism that feels so accessible, and deeply joyful and light — pure and real. Not tainted by the spin of capitalism or American commercialism. She is the real deal. And with selfless service and so much enthusiasm and lack of judgment that is so refreshing. It is hugely attractive for me to spend time in Mexico City learning and growing together.
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Through this project, from the inner most truths to the outer expressions of the offering, we are embodying the future we were invoking and re-writing the scripts conditioned and believed in. This offering truly was birthed out of a profound correctness and alignment with the universe, as a celebration of our paths and struggles. We are doing the deep work ourselves, and walking the talk. There is no room for anything else. And we are healing the deepest wounds of the feminine through our creative action and abundance mindset. I know that this will be an offering that changes people’s lives, deeply. I trust that exactly the right women will show up, and I know that it will be exactly what it is meant to be.
I am moved to tears in divine grace of this journey, as it continues to unfold. As I continue on this path, my life gets simpler — the next step gets revealed and my choices for where I spend my time are clearer as I become more sovereign. I become lighter and more joyful. I stop carrying so much on my back. I learn to let go and truly surrender. The retreat with John was a before-after kind of experience — I feel like my life completely changed afterwards, and it obliterated and made clear what my life is about. Its help allow my dharma to become much clearer. This is the process that is happening through us. We no longer need to know the plan or be “in charge”. And it is truly the biggest relief of all.
