In my late 20’s I found myself going through a box of my childhood journals. These were the books in bright colors with a little lock and key to supposedly keep your little brother or parents out of your private thoughts.

I opened them in order and read the precise cursive capturing what mattered to me in my inner and outer worlds as a pre-teen. I grew ever more disturbed by the realization that by about 12 years old I was deeply depressed. I was clearly a superficially happy little white girl, who was loved and supported by two parents and living a middle class, privileged, entitled life in a very beautiful place on earth. And I was confused that in spite of all of these blessings that I was aware of I was so deeply heart broken.

I didn’t understand what was wrong with me and I was terrified to tell anyone but my diary. All I knew as a child was that the world was breaking my heart day after day.

The more I searched for answers to what I didn’t understand was depression, the more I despaired on those pages. I was convinced that my culture was feeding me lies and complete crap and that I was somehow crazy for not accepting it all.

Jumping forward 10 years, I am wrestling with clarifying the teachings of Year 3 of The Cycle of Transformation. The teachings are coming from Star and I am struggling with the star-to-human interface. But people are showing up for this retreat in 2 months and I have to get it together. I still haven’t figured out that this star is basically trying to teach me Taoism, journey by journey, which carries its own issues of interpretation. I’m stumped. If Star can be frustrated, I am sure this one was.

And then in a stroke of multi-sensory, many-ways-of-knowing genius that I have only experienced when being shoved into by a helping spirit while in a journey altered state, I was emersed in the emotions and feelings of my broken-hearted child self while still also my adult self. Star overlaid the heart powers, highlighting the excesses and deficiencies of that child’s broken heart. Star then moved the powers into their regenerative relationships so that I could feel the innate capacity of the heart to heal, while moving me through the transformation of my heart from then to now.

Then with my mind and heart already completely blown, star added the dimension of elemental energies moving within the heart powers and the chambers creating an ever-constant and ever-changing flow and balance. That indescribable, multi-sensory experience became the Rosetta stone key for interpreting all of the other Star journeys and the teachings of Year 3 came together in the nick of time.

What Star did that day was to move the four powers of the heart, similar to Angeles Arrien’s work that can be found in The Four-fold Way*, into living, breathing, regenerative, multi-ways of knowing relationships with each other. Living those relationships lays out a path to literally being whole-hearted in this heart-breaking world. Learn the practices for the cultivation of your regenerative and expressive whole heart. Join me for the Awakening the Courageous Heart Series.

* With great gratitude I honor Angeles Arrien, a Basque-American cultural anthropologist, educator, award-winning author, and a grandmother of the effort to lift up indigenous ways of knowing and thinking as a corrective path forward. She was the founder and president of the Angeles Arrien Foundation for Cross-Cultural Education and Research, which focuses on the preservation of indigenous wisdoms, environmental sustainability, multi-cultural bridging and effective intergenerational leadership demonstrated by both elders and youth. With her blessing and permission, I brought her teaching of the archetypal heart powers into Year One of The Cycle of Transformation and it’s cosmology, which changed their relationship to each other and opened the way for Year Three and Awakening the Courageous Heart.