Cycle Breaking and Cold Coffee.

The things we do to get free.

Predawn pink and gray with a tinge of blue filter through the curtainless hallway window cut into my little tin cottage that faces north towards the mountains. 

My French press is ready. Well grounded, perfectly steeped, I pour a cup and sit facing that northerly direction—staring into the triple wicked candle and beginning to pray to all things holy to give me the strength to face my life’s circumstances right now,  let alone the gawd-blessed day.

“Uma!” Pitter patter, thump thump… my heart sinks as the 4-year-old emerges around the coroner a good half an hour earlier than I had hoped. She demands to “blow out my candle”.

“No.”

Demands for light (Fine). Requests for oatmeal. Happily!

My mouth doesn’t want to answer toddler-type questions before I have had coffee. My mouth doesn’t really want to move at all, nor my voice to be forced from its quiet perch behind the cords that are not yet ready to vibrate in response to anything. 

I just want my fucking coffee.

The young one has needs, though, and a routine that I have set in place. It has been years and years since I have adhered to anyone’s routine other than my own. We go “tinkle” . I set a timer on Alexa for every hour to help us remember. Then she eats her oatmeal, I administer meds, she brushes her teeth, her hair, and we pick out clothes. Then playtime. At some point the smaller one, 7 months old, wakes up, needs changing, needs a bottle, needs some actual breakfast, needs changing again, followed by a snack, cries for “Uma”, another “tinkle” timer, requests for a movie, toys, games, a fit or two. Poop. More poop….and poop. So much poop.

And my coffee has gone bloody cold. 

I am stepping into this situation: mind, body, and heart.

I am claiming this rite of passage into matriarchy that many women and mothers make. I am taking my daughter’s children into my home because that is what is needed. I’m trying not to be a martyr about it—and I am frustrated with the lack of consciousness that led to this scenario unfolding, as I am with its ongoing persistence. I am sitting amidst patterns that are no longer my own. I have cleared this shit. I have spent years in therapy and on my hands and knees crying to Gawd, bleeding redemption, and shedding this shit.

I just didn’t clear it fast enough or early enough in my life and now I get to live through the choices I made as a young mother, as lived out through my daughter. I surrendered custody for a time to her grandparents before I decided that she and my own blessed soul were more important than getting high on meth. This is not shame or blame, it is a consequence of the movement, or lack of movement, in certain patterns of behavior. And I am facing them head on from a place of disentanglement and compassion. 

Then why do I feel like the “bad” guy? 

Because cycle breaking is ugly and sometimes lonely work. Work that must be done outside of the system that created it. I must be disloyal to those who have perpetuated these destructive patterns—living and dead. 

I feel the pull, internally, but only subtly, of the ones who came before me who planted the seeds of these patterns in bodies that came before and then bore me. I see them being enacted out through people who I would just as soon not have in my world, but whom I have to now interact with. I have been side-stepping this for years, and yet have known it was coming. 

Cycle breaking is serious business. It means we will be disliked, gaslit, and told we are being “dramatic”. What we are is too aware to allow these patterns to take any more nourishment from our sacred soil, and so we endure. We endure being lonely and disliked. We stand up to ridicule and we stare fire into the narcissistic mask that takes hold of people who maybe we once loved and maybe still do. 

It is fucking harrrd! 

The consequences of not doing this “work” is that not only do we pass these patterns on to another generation, but we ourselves never really experience free will. Instead we remain subject to predetermined set of options and experiences that are held in place by what we unconsciously create through our unresolved somatic realities and trauma. 

Looking is hard. Changing is harder. Not feeding into systems that perpetuate these cycles of abuse, abandonment, addiction, and enmeshment is the fucking work…and it is damn well worth occasionally drinking cold coffee. 

I hope there is something here for you. I hope I’m not rambling incoherently, but if I am a bit then so be it because if I do not continue to make some time, even a meager bit, to write and share then I am not being true. 

I’ve decided to postpone the Dream Keys course to allow myself time to “land” in my new reality with these small and demanding beings who are currently residing with me. 

I am still seeing clients during this time and the “medicine” I’m carrying is deeply rooted and compassionately grounded. My preferred method of working with people is in a monthly container. I hear that my current “state” is good for people’s systems and inner child. So that’s where we are today.

Much love, and thank you. 

~Justice