In our Conversations With A Couple Of Crones Podcast, episode 11, we talked about Remembering! How easy it is to forget the things we are learning as we make this inner work journey, and how glorious it is to remember! Our friend and Gene Keys guide, Hayley Curtis, always says that she thinks that forgetting is actually a gift … given to us humans so that we can have the pure joy of remembering.

In that CWACOC episode, we spoke of the many tools, and hooks and triggers that we use, in order to remember the lessons we are learning as we make this deep dive into our inner worlds.

In his audio for the 33^rd Gene Key (the Shadow of Forgetting, the Gift of Mindfulness and the Siddhi of Revelation), Richard Rudd talks about how this Gene Key (which is in all of us, whether it is in our chart or not!) is “a lover of story, song, myth, and archetype”, and that is something that Meghan and I lean into every single day. We tell each other and you, our dear readers, the stories of our lives, of our inner work, of our Gene Keyes. We create images with words and AI and art journaling to wrap around the stories we tell ourselves and each other.

We tell these stories and create these images so that we might remember, day after day, the breakthroughs and insights and epiphanies we are having as we do this inner work.

It’s the Interconnections of My Gene Keys that Create the Story

The further into my Gene Keys that I go, the more interconnections I see.

Throughout my whole life I have seen the way these Shadows of Provocation, Struggle,  Control and Inadequacy wove a net of fear and lack around me.

Each Provocation was a reminder that life IS struggle.

Each Struggle was grounds for grasping at more and more control.

And through it all the underlying seam of inadequacy ran … the whispers that said, “You’re just not good enough!”.

As I cycled through these Shadows, the net of fear just got tighter and tighter. I felt trapped for so much of my life …

Trapped by the circumstances of my life.

Trapped by the fear of the next bad thing happening.

Trapped by the people who wanted to control me.

Trapped by my own need to control every aspect of my life.

However, if I can step out of that tightly woven net of fear that is the Shadows of my Activation Sequence, I get to see a whole different picture. Instead of only seeing the version of the story of my life that is one of perpetual struggle; a story of ricocheting from one crisis to the next; of surviving one traumatic event after another; I see a picture painted by my Gifts.

I see a story of a valiant woman who overcame all the obstacles strewn in her path to be able to write a new story for herself.

A story where our heroine is dynamic, full of joy and love and optimism. A story where she not only perseveres through challenge after challenge, but one in which she does so with honour. There is no shame and no guilt to be found in a story of overcoming struggle. There is only courage, and love, and a limitless capacity for trust.

The heroine of this story is not afraid, not because all the evils have been vanquished, but because she now trusts that no matter what happens in her external world, she is carrying safety and trust in her heart. She is alight with her Gifts.

She is the Warrior of Light, who cannot be defeated as long as she keeps her heart open, as long as she loves herself, and allows all that love and light to wash over every person and every situation she encounters.

And what does all this courage and trust, all this love and light do?

It liberates her! She need no longer feel trapped, even when she finds obstacles in her path, because her freedom is in her own heart.

This story that I want to tell is an epic saga, and I am the Warrior, whose cloak may be battle worn, and who may bear scars from her many battles, but who is still riding towards the sun.

She sits tall and straight on her horse, ready to overcome any obstacle that comes her way; ready to fight for the underdog; always ready to help; always moving forward on her path. She is not afraid of anything, because she knows that she is safe, she knows that this vast landscape that she carries in her heart, this field of pure potentiality, holds everything she needs.

And she is not in a hurry! She has time. She is part of a very long saga.

And she has got a lot more to do in this story!

I was so inspired by Meghan’s post The Art of Vibrational Frequency: A Visual Story, that I decided I would share the story I wrote about my Activation Sequence. (I have only just finished my Venus Sequence as I write this, so I haven’t yet written that story yet!).

The Epic Saga of My Activation Sequence

I am a woman who has had to overcome many struggles in her life. I am a woman who has suffered pain and loss and trauma for decades. From the childhood trauma of losing my father and of having a mother who was entirely emotionally unavailable to me; through to the adult trauma of an abusive marriage, where my every action and emotion was controlled by another.

I lived a life where I was behind so many layers of protection and of self-loathing, that I was completely disconnected from myself for decades. Blocked from my own evolution; blocked from my own love.
I felt worthless. I never felt as if I were good enough.

And yet, despite the suffering, despite the lack of confidence and self-belief and love, despite the control exerted over me by others, I never gave up.

I persevered. I found the strength and energy to keep going, even when all the odds were stacked against me.

And more than just “keeping going”, I grew as a person. I found reserves within myself to keep showing up for myself. I showed up in the pages of my journal every day, month after month, year after year, until I had written my way out of the story that no longer served me.

I became the author of my own life, no longer a victim to either circumstance or other people’s beliefs or ideas about who I was and what I should do or say, or who I should be.

I became my own person.

I became the woman I was born to be.

A dynamic, resourceful, wise motherfucker, who could not only stand up for herself, but who could shine a light for other women. I became the Warrior of Light that I needed, the Warrior of Light that I was always meant to be.

Every day I show up for myself, I show up for love. I have surrendered to the flow of life. I have learned to trust life, to trust myself.
I have learned to trust that I will ALWAYS find my answers inside myself, that I will always find all that I need, right here in my open heart.

I have learned that I am safe, that I carry my own safety inside myself.

I have learned that an open heart cannot be broken, and that the shadows are not to be feared; they are to be embraced, because every shadow contains the seeds of my gifts and siddhis.

I have learned that I am EXACTLY who I am meant to be, and that I am perfect just the way I am.

So that’s my story.

Now, I decided to do Meghan’s exercise of distilling my 4 Activation Gene Keys down into phrases that I could hold as a mantra …

I am an unblocker of joy pipes; my dynamism liberates dynamism in others.
I am a warrior of light, who fights for love.
I am the author of my own life, and I am writing an epic saga.
I am a grounded, resourceful wise woman, whose roots are deep in the earth, but whose hands and eyes are reaching for the sun.

Excavating our Deepest Desires

When I shared that story with Meghan, and we got into a conversation about this work, she said to me that not only are we excavating our shadows, we are excavating our deepest desires, and that statement blew me away.

I know that we’re looking at our shadows, and I know that we’re moving through those shadows, but excavating the dream is really what this work is.

I’ve got to be honest with you, I feel as if I already got my big dream, which is being married to the love of my life, but all the other dreams that I had, when I was younger, they are falling away.

I still want to write, but I DO write every day, so I’m doing that already. I’m living that dream and I may not be a published author yet, but I’m writing every day.

And I think that I’m realizing my deepest desire every day, by doing this work. Because I’m learning to love myself just the way I am. And isn’t that the dream? Isn’t that the basis of every dream?

Because if you love yourself, you can do anything, and you can be anything.

And I don’t know who or what I will become, but I know that I can become anything! If I can dream it, I can BE it! And it’s okay that I don’t know, because the not knowing is the Deep well inside me, and I know that I am safe to dive in, because then anything can happen. And who knows where I’ll be in a year’s time. Never mind 5 years or 10 years’ time. Who knows what dreams I will have then? I mean, I may end up living a dream life that I can’t even possibly imagine right now, because actually right now, doing this work, and having my best friend Meghan, having my wonderful guide Hayley, and having an amazing community of women around me, I am already living a life that I could never have imagined 5, 10 years ago.

I mean, 20 years ago, if you had described my life as it is right now, I would have said that was a fantasy. That was a fairy tale and that could never come true.

So, I’m already living my wildest dreams … who knows where I may go next as I continue to excavate my deepest desires, and I continue to write my epic saga?!

You can read and listen to Meghan’s stories of her Activation and Venus Sequences here.