I don’t know about you, but I can chew on a random little piece of thought candy for a very long time. Take the IG post by The Moon Tarot (@themoontarot) that I shared in my last email - it said …

“As you sit on your throne,

observe the truth.

Watch it glisten as those gems of wisdom

catch the most mystical light,

leading you through the darkness.

Your spiritual fortress is protected.”

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As I chewed on this little morsel, what came forward was this distillation as an energy that I’m bringing into 2024 …

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Sit on your throne.

Observe what’s true.

Move accordingly.

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I've continued to roll this around for myself and wonder how it's relevant to the greater theme of being unbound, free and fully alive that I've set out to explore this year (I'm picturing the owl 🦉 from the Tootsie Pop commercial of my youth who, trying to see how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll at the center, takes a few patient licks and then chomp - chews right to the center). Here's where my exploration has taken me so far ...

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👑 Sit on your throne. This is our seat of true personal power - to sit on our throne is to claim our sovereignty and all the sacred responsibility that accompanies it.

For many of us, this is the journey of a lifetime - gaining and regaining our seat on the throne. Why? Because to be truly installed on the throne of our inner kingdom is to take loving responsibility for managing the course and direction of our lives - to honestly and lovingly invest our precious resources and to consciously direct our lives from the inside-out. And this is simply not a skill well-taught, nor a point of view deeply valued, validated or encouraged in our culture. As a result, we waver in our devotion to ourselves and the conscious wielding of our personal power.

Sometimes it looks like handing the crown and scepter to someone else - whether they ask for it or not (ever travelled alone and realized that when you don’t have friends or family to take into consideration, you spend a lot of time sitting quietly in a sunny window watching birds or reading books or listening to music instead of going to ball games or movies or watching TV, (or vice-versa)? For some of us, it’s pretty easy to lose ourselves in the orbit of other people).

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Sometimes it looks like busying ourselves tending the thrones and throne rooms of our loved ones, our co-workers, and even complete strangers (ever invested hours of your attention certain that you know what's best for your adult child’s life; ever spent endless watts of your energy trying to convince a casual acquaintance why your opinion is right and theirs is wrong; ever dedicated waves of your emotions wondering why the cashier at the grocery store was so bitchy or wringing your hands wondering what you “should have said’ after the fact? - yeah, me neither, Not even sure where these examples could have come from 😉).

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​Ultimately, the line of succession to each of our inner thrones is clear - we are the only sovereign who can legitimately sit the throne. Whatever we might tell ourselves about the very good reasons we have for stepping away, the path back to ourselves and our deepest sense of freedom runs right through the center of our inner throne room and depends on our willingness to wear the crown.

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Here's a practice for exploring your relationship with sitting on your throne: Close your eyes and take the space of a few breaths to settle into your breath and your body. When you’re ready, invite yourself to enter your inner throne room. Notice where you find yourself (it may not be the throne room you expect; you might find yourself in a garden, in the woods, in a library, anywhere - trust yourself) and take in as many details as you can to allow yourself to orient to this inner space. When you feel more oriented, move toward what you perceive to be your throne (again, may not be a traditional throne at all) and take in as many details as you are able. Check in with the sensations in your body as you move toward the throne - is there constriction anywhere? Expansion? Is your breath deep or shallow? - and see how you are feeling as you approach this seat of inner power. Trust what you are feeling; it’s okay if there’s discomfort; if alarm bells are going off in your nervous system, move away from the throne until they settle and simply pause there for as long as you need. If you feel like you have the capacity to do so, sit on the throne and notice how you feel. Is it a challenge to imagine yourself seated on the throne? Is it pretty easy? Can you stay there or do you find yourself suddenly elsewhere in the room or your mind wandering from the visualization? How does it feel to be seated on the throne (for however long you are able)? Stay for as long as feels useful to you (again, if there are alarm bells in your nervous system - you are feeling stressed by being in the visualization - move away from the throne and the throne room as needed) and then express gratitude in your way before bringing your awareness slowly back to the outer world. When you are ready to open your eyes, take a moment to slowly gaze around your room to reorient to your space and remind yourself that all is well.

Grab a journal and write about your experience of this visualization. Then free write about these questions - What was as you expected? What was not as you expected? What were the signals that told you that you were comfortable or uncomfortable during the visualization? How might you support yourself in being seated more ease-fully on your inner throne everyday?

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Observe what’s true. From your seat of inner power, you have a clearer view of what is true for you - even as you acknowledge that it might shift and evolve as you shift and evolve.

Let’s face it, we believe a lot of stories and narratives about ourselves, our lives and one another that are at best inaccurate and at worst complete works of fiction - I’m the smart one so I can’t care that much about how I look; he’s a “good person” b/c he goes to church; she’s a gold-digger b/c she’s dating an older man; if they would just cooperate no one would get hurt. The list goes on and on and on and covers the full spectrum of a slight skewing of what’s accurate to all-out whale 🐳 tales and everything in between.

And from an early age, many of us are encouraged to override our innate sense of what is true, and right and accurate in favor of an external (and often binary) system of "right" and "wrong". While it is important when we live in community to honor our obligations - the social contracts of being around other humans, for instance - subjugating our truth and handing over our personal power in the name of fitting in does not serve us individually or collectively. We need to recognize a harmony of inner and outer so that what we are investing in is a sense of belonging within a community rather than reshaping ourselves in order to fit in.

If we hope to free ourselves from the confines of the same tired patterns and the same old, worn out stories playing out in our lives, we will need to develop a willingness (and the related skill set) to challenge the underlying “truths” that keep us anchored to their “rightness”. To really do this work with ourselves in a way that doesn’t invest in further harm - to ourselves or others - means devoting ourselves to (re)gaining our seat of power every time we notice that we've wandered.

When we seek to dismantle the untruths in our lives from a place of powerlessness and wounding, we are far more likely to unconsciously spread more wounding than healing - imagine our efforts as pebbles dropped into a pool; the ripples that extend from that center point will be made up of whatever the pool contains (clear water, murky liquid, slime and toxic sludge) and the waves that reach the shore will spread that substance. When we take the time to observe what’s true from the vantage point of being seated on our inner throne, we are able to be far more conscious of the impact that our inquiries will have and better prepared to navigate the outcome from a place of love and honesty - for ourselves and others.

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Here are some questions you can to ask yourself when you are wrestling with a repeating pattern that you no longer wish to invest in. Use them as journal prompts to see what stories or beliefs or habitual thinking might be at work behind the scenes. Sometimes, the underlying story lies hidden beneath flowery words that disguise their deeper meaning and very sharp thorns.

Is this true?

Is this still true for me?

What else might be true?

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Move accordingly. This was my addition to the original sentiment and it emerged quite unbidden - choose your next right step(s) based on the spectrum of possibilities that are available to you from the vantage point of being seated on your throne and observing what is true (rather than walking out the same tired pattern in the same frustrating way and encountering the same infuriating or uninspiring result).

Being unbound, free and fully alive is not an intellectual pursuit or a thought experiment - it is designed to inform the way that we each move through our lives and the world; it is designed to create the steps to the dance of life that we participate in every single day with each and every choice we make. Freedom lies in movement that is unencumbered by the half truths, the untruths and the skewed perspectives that have dominated so much of our lives and informed so many of our choices in this lifetime.

Claiming our freedom - and holding that vision for every other being on the planet - is a conscious act of deep trust of self and love of self that requires us to move; to take the next right step; to be open to the dance even when we don’t yet know all the steps to the choreography (yup - we might look a little silly and take a few bumps and bruises as we trip over our own feet here and there).

We are not meant to stand on the sidelines of our lives, wringing our hands and wondering what might have been - there is no freedom found there. We are meant to be in the arena (h/t to Brené Brown) living our lives in alignment with our personal power and truth to the very fullest extent we are able. Like a vigorous round of double-dutch, we might be standing on the side getting the timing right before we step in but step in we must - even when it means that we might end up wrapped up in rope, with skinned knees. Not participating is not a viable option.

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Here are some words to consider: this is an excerpt from the speech by Teddy Roosevelt that Brené Brown references in her books and in her talks when talking about “being in the arena”; the speech is popularly known as the “Man in the Arena” speech -

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“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

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What sticks out to you about this part of the speech? Where in your life are you in the arena? Where are you standing on the sidelines quietly watching? And where are you the critic pointing out when the “strong man stumbles” - even when that strong man is yourself?

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So, dear soul, this is the energy I’m bringing with me into our time together in 2024. In this year’s email series, I’ll be wondering out loud about being unbound, being free and being fully alive - in ourselves, in our lives and in the world - and all that comes with it - the good, the bad, and the ugly. Freedom sounds pretty great from the outside but consciously cultivating it as an inner posture and way of moving through the world may call on us to demonstrate a level of devotion to self and practice and life that we may not have brought to our lives until now.

I believe in us.

Here we go …
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Sending you Love,

Tawnia

PS: Whew - this ended up being a long one. Thanks for sticking with me. Feel free to hot reply and let me know what resonates most with you and if any of it has turned into thought candy for you to chew on.

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Here's what I'm up to:

꩜ 6 Months of 1-to-1 Support with ME! - it's time to approach life from a completely new perspective - one that is uniquely, wholly and lovingly your own and I cannot wait to support you on the journey. Schedule a free 30-minute Connection Call with me today and let's talk about working closely together to make 2024 the year you look back on and say "that's when everything shifted for me". (psst - when you sign-up this month, you'll receive an additional 1:1 session to use anytime during our 6-month journey together). Let's get started consciously creating the simple shifts that invariably usher in all the meaningful transformation that you're dreaming of.

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Other offerings you might find interesting:

🪶 Rest & Contemplation w/ Sarah Nelsen: my friend Sarah is focusing her work in 2024 on creating space for you to escape from the noise, (the media, the election, the drama, the people telling them what to think, etc) and tap into your own inner voice of wisdom so she's offering a FREE online class on February 1st at 10am PT (7am ET) call Rest & Contemplation. The class will include gentle movement, attention to breath, restorative shapes and contemplation prompts. Journals encouraged! Perfect for you if you are feeling overwhelmed by the noise and ready to dive into the quiet within yourself. REGISTER HERE

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