the sword of sovereignty
becoming vertical in a world shaped to bend you into submission
i keep thinking about thresholds.
what it means to stand at the doorway between who you are and who you came here to become.
there’s a wisdom we tend to forget during our busy, chaotic lives, as we spend our time trying to survive this crazy world we call home.
it’s more of a remembrance, really.
a recalling of the ancient truth.
the part of you walking around in this body is not the whole you.
think of avatar or the matrix — two of my favorite movies of all time because of this exact message.
when you are inside the planet earth simulation, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you are more than this experience. because everything in our world begs you to forget this.
but the truth is, your human form is always channeling something larger — what some call the oversoul, the higher self, the part of you that exists beyond the limits of a single lifetime.
you forget this, almost completely, the moment you arrive.
yet the forgetting is not an accident.
it’s by design.
so many restrictions and limitations exist in this 3d reality we call home, that our challenge is that much greater. since you are only allowed a very limited number of tools to draw on while inside an earth suit.
the whole point of being here is to find your way back to who you already are.
this teaching shows up across traditions — in vedic texts, in the accounts of people who have died and come back, in the work of hypnotherapists who discovered past lives while bringing their patients back to forgotten trauma, in what certain channelers have spent decades pointing toward.
and across all of it, the same essential map keeps emerging.
so let me offer you one way i find helpful to hold it.
think of it like an escape room.
if you were handed the answer the moment you walked in, the whole experience would collapse.
the learning, the growth, the discovery of inner resources you didn’t know you had — all of it depends on not knowing the way out in advance.
earth school works the same way.
you arrive with your memory wiped clean. you are handed the limited tools of three-dimensional reality and then you have to find your way home.
limitation is not a punishment.
it’s the whole point.
the vedic texts describe how our sun makes enormous loops around a central star, in a galactic cycle that, like the seasons, has its summers and its winters, its ages of light and its ages of shadow.
they call this the yuga cycle, and the age we have been living through is the kali yuga — the dark age, the far-out point in that great loop, the time of densest forgetting.
and in the kali yuga, what flourishes is fear and domination.
what i think of as the hindbrain, or survival brain, running the show — with the five ‘f’ word activities running dominant: fight, flight, flee, freeze, fornicate…you get the idea. it’s the paradigm that worships force over feeling, and mistakes dominance for strength. it’s the belief that if you can just control enough, own enough, suppress enough — you will finally be safe.
and according to these teachings, we have been in this far-out point of the kali yuga for a very long time.
you can see it everywhere if you look: the same pattern in different clothes across different centuries.
empires.
institutions.
every empire, every institution, running the same frequency of control, domination, and enforced forgetting.
even the christian church, that insists on telling you there is only one life, that you will burn in hell, that your salvation requires their permission and your money — while the actual teachings of jesus and mary magdalene were saying something else entirely.
heaven is within your heart. you are a seat of holy divinity. that was the original message.
and it got co-opted, the way beautiful things always get co-opted when power decides it wants them.
it’s the same story as the billionaire baby boys trying to own and modify and control their way to godhood.
different century, different costume, identical consciousness.
absolute power corrupting absolutely.
it always has. it always will.
and for a long time, that has been the frequency running the show.
but something is shifting.
i truly believe this.
can you feel it too?
something in the body that says — oh, we are at the turn, we are at a crossroads.
and i’m not the only one feeling it.
the near death experiencers coming back with the same accounts.
the past life hypnotherapists whose patients all describe the same between-lives landscape.
the channelers and the quantum physicists arriving, from completely opposite directions, at the same fundamental truth about the nature of consciousness.
the kali yuga is ending.
the cycle is turning.
we have been experiencing a planetary dark night of the soul.
yet the only true constant is change and we are here for exactly this.
the frequency is changing and those of us who have been doing this work — the excavation, the healing, the long slow process of learning to feel what we were trained not to — we are beginning to realize that we were never actually alone, fighting in the dark.
we were each weaving our own piece of the same majestic tapestry.
each one of us a divine drop of the ocean of consciousness.
we are all of these little raindrops — each one lighting up, turning on, one by one, becoming a lighthouse, or a rainbow prism as the light hits us just so.
because that’s what happens when enough drops come together.
all the raindrops don’t just add up, they become a rainbow.
and you cannot stop a rainbow.
once the conditions are right, once the rain and the sunlight meet, it just happens.
it cannot be prevented.
that’s what we are doing now.
that’s why i also like to call us a superbloom.
you might feel like the only flower reaching up and cracking from your seed, but you are, in fact, growing in a vast meadow of wildflowers alongside millions of others.
we have all been fighting alone in the dark, our only light that of our little flashlights.
thinking we were isolated, thinking our particular wound or battle or piece of the puzzle had nothing to do with anyone else’s, we have been looking for clues.
but we were all carrying fragments of the same puzzle.
pieces of the divine mother, of gaia, of consciousness itself — which pours itself into each one of us and then watches to see what we do with it.
and what we are doing, slowly, imperfectly, is turning on.
our little heart lights are coming on and beginning to radiate warmth and light out into this dark world.
and when enough lights come on, you begin to realize you were never alone in the dark to begin with.
you were just waiting for your eyes to adjust.
we have been taught to transcend the body, to rise above it and treat it as the lesser half of this equation.
but i don’t believe that.
i think the body is the whole point.
the soul doesn’t come here to escape matter.
it comes here to enter it, fully, in order to do something that cannot be done from the outside.
we came here to alchemize pain into power.
to be the bridge between what is purely material and what is purely divine.
the beings who are not in bodies — and i do believe they exist, in the same way i believe in everything i can feel but cannot prove — they are watching what we’re doing here with something i can only describe as reverence.
because what we’re doing is hard in a way that is entirely particular to having a body, to living in a place this dense.
to choose to come here, to forget, to have your humanity assaulted for lifetimes on that karmic wheel, and then to still find your way back to yourself — that is one of the most extraordinary things a soul can do.
i was in yoga a few nights ago, finally in shavasana, after an hour of moving and breathing, when an image arrived.
it was of a golden sword and coiling around it, was a blue dragon.
i lay there and let it sink in, my whole body soft and in that post-yoga stillness.
i understood then, in the way you understand things that come through the body rather than the mind, that i’d been circling this image for years without knowing it— maybe even longer, quite possibly my whole life.
and the next morning i painted what i’d seen.
i call it the sword of sovereignty.
the gold vertical spine representing the uprightness of the human being.
the vertical plane is the spiritual while the horizontal is the material. it’s the cross — an ancient symbol long before christianity adopted it and gave it a different story.
and you see it everywhere once you know to look.
even the caduceus, the staff with two serpents coiling around it, the symbol of medicine in this country, is the same image.
the vertical column of the human body as a conduit between worlds.
we are the staff.
our spine is the sword.
and that’s why there is such talk of the war on consciousness. for once humans wake up to our full potential, once we realize we cannot be dominated by fear and hatred, what will we be able to create as sovereign beings?
once we learn to recognize the cross as a map and we awaken to realize that the human being stands exactly where those two lines meet.
that’s when we realize we are sacred beyond imaginable proportion.
and therein lies the whole teaching.
we stand right there at the intersection.
in my painting, fire rises on either side of the sword of sovereignty, orange and red, the colors of will and blood and transformation. the root chakra.
the body that has been under assault in the long fight for survival on this planet.
and above, a cool blue dragon, gentle and all knowing spirit’s light, hovering and encircling the sword. she is holy, serene, wise beyond worlds. her swirling energy moves around a still center.
she is not threatening. she is witnessing. and the dragon represents the alchemized reptilian brain.
it still carries the full memory of shadow, of fear and scarcity and the drive to dominate or be dominated. it knows that territory completely. it has lived there. but it has moved through something, integrated rather than ruled.
and that is why all ancient cultures have dragons in their lore.
a dragon breathes fire and fire is sovereignty. the flame that burns away what no longer serves. the fire that says: i know what i am, and i will not be diminished.
a dragon also flies. it has taken the weight of all that survival and learned to rise, not to escape the material plane but to see it clearly, to move between both worlds with the full force of both.
a dragon protects from heart force, not fear. that’s what those of us on the healing journey have been doing.
we have been taking the reptilian wound, the trauma, the survival patterning, the years of pure fear, and turning it into something that can fly.
and when that dragon, or kundalini serpent energy moves freely through the spine, when we are not collapsed in the hindbrain, not fragmented by unwitnessed trauma, we become something new.
a clear channel.
the human being at the intersection can stop defending long enough to actually transmit. that is what the healing is for.
it’s not that we arrive somewhere resolved and finished.
we become free enough from the old survival patterning to stand up straight.
and when we let the energy move through us, as clearly as possible, we become a bridge between heaven and earth.
a sword forged in fire is unstoppable.
stone remembers what we forget.
our earth holds the key inside her molten core.
when we take time to slow down and return to our bodies and nature. to breathe, to stop doing and start being.
we are human beings after all…
this seventh century georgian cross was carved not in gold or glass but in earth itself.
stone pulled from the ground, shaped by human hands into the map of where we stand.
angels holding the horizontal and vertical planes.
just as we are human angels at the heart of the intersection.
our ancestors knew. the symbols were never hidden.
we were.
but we are hiding no longer.
i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞