There are so many different buses in the world. The kind of conceptual buses that can take you to many different places. In my younger years, I often found myself on buses taking me further into the ‘wild west’. Crypto was one of them. Startups another. New Age was an even further bus stop. I liked being on the edge of whatever the collective was doing. It’s only through it that I realized how immature it all was.

I couldn’t write yesterday because my wifi stopped working, and I had some company I couldn’t take my eyes off of.

The soul is always trying to heal

There’s this huge New Age to Christianity pipeline going on. This is the bus I feel like I just got off of (or on?). If you’re in the spiritual space, you’ve seen it. I’m in that pipeline, FOR SURE. Kat Von D is famously in that pipeline. She just went Orthodox.

So, what the heck is going on?

My primary theory is that it’s just the soul trying to heal (and a dash, or a dollop, of some personality stuff, depending on how you look at it).

The soul is on a bus. That bus is called ‘healing’ and it only has a felt sense of where to get off. So when the bus stop comes up that says ‘New Age’, it says oh, that’s one step closer, I think that’s right for now, so let’s get off and look around.

I believe that the soul is always trying to heal. It’s always trying to move us through the journey we chose to take to get to the other side. 

I think it’s really always trying to go to the same place, the place that it came from, and the place that it will return. But again, it only knows what that place feels like. It’s like truly, getting on a bus, and being like I guess we’ll get off when it feels right. And all the stuff in the way, the traumas, the body, the illness and disease, the personality, the struggle and challenge of living, is just it trying to remove all the markers from the map that we thought would help us find the right stop. It decided to go on a pretty major journey, and now it’s finding its way home. And it might get there, and it might not.

The map we have can get messy. You spill coffee on it (trauma). You fold it wrong (heartbreak). Some of the names of cities get smudged off because the ink wore off (illness or disease).

I think there’s just stuff in the way of what really serves us to love ourselves, love the world, love something greater than us. At least, that’s been my experience.

And, there’s these rabbit holes of belief systems going on, and they can pull us away from reality and balance. We live in a pretty radicalized society in more ways than one. Our food is a mess, our water can’t always be trusted, we have epidemics of addiction, child abuse, war overseas, loneliness, single-parenthood, and not too long ago, we literally had a disease epidemic that shut the entire country down.

I know people are just trying their best. I’m trying my best. When everyone’s seeking answers and healing from the place of what can feel like total chaos and harm, it’s no wonder we might get off at the wrong stop. We’re all just seeking new solutions for what feels like uniquely new and terrible problems, for what’s made the map hard to read.

Information overload teaches us discernment

The paths to radicalization feel pretty slick in this timeline, too. There’s so much information in this day and age that isn’t grounded in the same frameworks of truth.

Even the conversations around “codependency” have changed. I know married Christians who will tell you, it’s bullshit, women are biologically dependant, and we shouldn’t try to pattern our way out of codependency because it’s natural to be codependent (especially as women). Therapists, who I don’t know their religious or spiritual background, might try to help you see your “attachment wounding” and work from that “scientific” framework but give you no sense of what a healthy relationship does include. A self-proclaimed New Age goddess might tell you your anxiety around relationships means you need to work it out in a BDSM scene with a more enlightened guru.

It’s like right there alone, I can see 4 to 5 different ways of interpreting the phenomenon of “codependency”. And I’ve had my own journey through it myself. Some things worked for me at some points, like when I did need to find a strong sense of self-worth, and then it doesn’t when you’re thinking about feminine embodiment.

The amount of information in the world about how you should live your life, from the opinions of people on all different parts of the path, different levels of healing, different states of maturity, different goals, even, from different starting points, is just wild. 

I’m feeling just how chaotic it all is today. The tension of it all. And how it’s lacking in integrity, groundedness, experience, and real results. I’m reminded that in between all of that tension is a yes, AND. Is the need for discernment and prudence. Is the need for a slow pace of study and not holding on too tightly to any one thing.

That we change and we heal, and maybe what kind of information and framework we need does, too. That the map we have changes. That it’s all about learning, not that bus stop, but this one.

Can we hold that they’re all valid? That everything on the path to healing, when we use it as that, is valid, and we can look at it all as getting us closer and closer to a place of love?

If we don’t hold on too tightly to any one thing, we can just keep enjoying the journey of the bus ride.

The information overload of today can, at the very least, teach us the power of discernment.

And the bus ride stops being so heavy and maybe just a little more fun. And maybe you’ll turn some music on and get off at the wrong stop and just know it’ll be back to pick you up later.

Love,
Val

UPDATE: NO LIVE STREAM THIS SUNDAY (8/24)
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