ʻohiʻa :: from outer dependence to inner source

J U L Y   3 0   ,   2 0 2 5

40th birthday baptism 🌈☀️💦🫧🕊️

The morning is purple and pink — cloaked in pastel hues as the sky yawns awake over the sea. I sit at my kitchen-table-perch, 1,000 feet above the heavenly blue.

I am alive; awake awake awake for it.

Flower essences have changed my life. Truly, my life is glowing from the inside out, and (this time) it’s happening because I followed my heart’s call to make an ʻohiʻa essence.

This little medicine is teaching my energy system how to “stay in its own lane” — to embrace radical authenticity and unconditional myself-ness, where I am no different on the outside than I am on the inside. Where I have no parts that I’m hiding or performing (eek! so thrilling). It’s illuminating all the reasons that we tend self-abandon in the first place. Namely, fear, and the danger of unbelonging.

The critical existential importance of being accepted is very real as a child. We cannot take care of ourselves, so we must be acceptable to our caretakers for our very survival. As we grow older, all of the conditions we *rightfully* developed throughout childhood are no longer functional, and must be reversed and undone, because what serves the child no longer serves the adult. We must travel backwards to the very core of ourselves. Back to our essential nature.

We must unravel each and every codependency — each and every place we sacrifice our authenticity on the altar of approval — every attempt to micro-manage and control our experience to source our needs from the outside — every place we give our power away, via the unconscious belief that something outside ourselves must be different in order for us to feel okay.

These are the patterns that surface when we start to unravel our codependency and claim a deeper desire for energetic sovereignty. And this is the magic of ʻohiʻa… powerful self-containment of our own pure and precious life force — not leaking it out everywhere via our thoughts and feelings — not taking in the energy of others and being colored by our perceptions of their thoughts and feelings. Dwelling fully and completely inside our own experience and energy is inhabiting our soul place. It’s letting our soul fully inhabit our body.

Most of us do this silly little dance we don’t even know we’re doing, where we wait for literally everything to go first. “I can’t feel good until x, y, z… I can’t let go and relax into my being until I know the conditions are 100% safe.” This is a losing game, because the ego is never safe. It will always try to protect and preserve itself. If you’re making decisions from that place, you will never be free.

ʻOhiʻa is helping me feel, sense, and claim my ability to instantly create the experience I wish to have, by making it fully mine and not entangling it in external codependency with others. Most of us have spent our entire lives handing the keys to our state of being to people / things outside ourselves. But our experience of life happens entirely on the inside! How very silly of us. The obvious consequence of this is unhappiness, chronic seeking, and a lack of fulfillment — never quite feeling like things are okay, constantly needing more and more validation from the outside.

The most important and not-so-obvious consequence is a loss / relinquishing of our single greatest power — our creativity.

To literally forfeit our power to create, embody, become… and to instead, choose victimhood. This is especially critical for the feminine to understand and reclaim, because the very essence and function of its nature is magnetic.

A woman sets the tone of everything through her feeling — through her state of being. A woman in her joy and pleasure and bliss body — a woman who takes full responsibility for her creational capacity to birth (through herself) any experience she chooses — can change the entire system that she’s inside of.

It is through our own sovereign beingness that we affect change. We embody the change on the inside, and everything outside of us resonates in harmonic attunement (or naturally falls away as a mismatch)…

As opposed to getting victim-y and rotten, demanding it from the outside and polluting the entire container. → Hint: this is a less common but powerfully accurate definition of codependency… needing others to provide to us what we ourselves are responsible for!… needing others to change in order for us to feel okay.

Reclaiming our freedom, authenticity, and power requires a complete reversal of everything we’ve been taught… everything we’ve habituated ourselves to.

Here’s a small, simple, but perfect little example of this from my life.

One night, Pat and I were watching a movie. Pat was on his phone a lot that day, managing the myriad aspects of our lives that he’s responsible for, and carrying so well. But there he was, on his phone during our movie time as well.

I suddenly felt that I knew what was best for him (presence, a detox from devices, a respite from responsibility, etc) and had a sudden impulse to ask him to put his phone down and be present. And yet, this impulse instantly felt wrong in my system.

I immediately became aware of where I can drop more deeply into my own presence. How could I demand presence of someone, when the very act of doing so is illuminating my own lack of presence — my own outer-focus?

Besides the obvious care that I have for him, what deeper codependencies are surfacing through this impulse to control his experience?

Well, I was desiring connection, not being fully aware of or responsible for my desire, and then projecting its lack of expression onto Pat. I was also making meaning that didn’t necessarily exist — believing that if he was on his phone, then we’re somehow not connected. Then my ego yells “You’re not connected! Red alert! This is a disconnect! A need isn’t being met here! Someone must be doing something wrong!” and off it goes on the hunt for need-fulfillment from the outside. Trying to fix a problem that doesn’t actually even exist just creates all kinds of problems.

So I returned to my own embodied experience. I settled into the presence that was there for me. I infused my experience with a much stronger felt sense / atmosphere of beingness. And organically, from the center of my being, flowed peace and gratitude and contentment for everything exactly as it is. I no longer feel the lack of anything, but a complete fullness. Abundance, rather than scarcity.

Like magic, he instantly put his phone down, looked to me, and took my hand in his.

It bursts my heart with bliss and awe, even as I write this months later. It’s just so exquisite! — this win-win power that we all possess. Being the source of our own experience liberates us from needing anything from others. And needing nothing attracts everything.

As they say… “The rich get richer”

“To him who has, more will be given”

“You don’t attract what you want. You attract what you are.”

We receive all that we desire because we become it — and then we are merely a vibrational match for more and more and more.