When I share my “skin care regimen”, I always test the waters first. I want to see how receptive to my personal flavor of weirdness the ask-er will be.
So first I share a few of the only-slightly-out-there things I put in, on and around my body that help.
For example: When I cook, I usually smear a bit of my avocado cooking oil on my skin. (Which, by the way, my dog LOVES.)
And I sweat every single day, intentionally. Steam room, hot tub, rowing, strength training… I get it in.
But then I go deeper and share this revelation: that most of my skin care is internal.
I brew up all sorts of concoctions and take all sorts of supplements that cultivate radiant health and wellbeing of my skin and joints and cells.
I take more Vitamin D than you’d think is sensible. (But given my body’s unique needs and demands, it really works for me.)
I drink a boat load of bone broth and eat a few servings a day of fermented foods.
I’ve concocted a mix of probiotics, mushrooms, collagen and… my favorite… chlorella that I just call by the code word LIFE.
I take some digestive enzymes and acids that I know for sure keep my body and skin nourished and electric.
And every day, I steam some kale and broccoli and blend it up with a little coconut milk and some filtered water into a super-pure smoothie … mmmmmmmmm.
(Side note that I think this is delicious but my friends disagree.)
And with all of that, the most powerful part of my internal skin care regimen is SPIRITUAL.
Meditation. Journaling. Daily declarations. Prayer. Movement. Connecting with all that is. Every day.
But say you don’t have the time or interest in doing all of that, I say, when asked. There is one hack… one single thing you can count on to age your skin and your body in reverse.
And that is to make a self-honoring, Inner Guidance following, life-and-self-aligning, Inner Critic overrling, cultural-rule-breaking decision anytime the opportunity presents itself.
Every time you make a decision to stop overruling and overriding your own Inner Guidance… every time you unpack a part of yourself you’ve been shoving down and holding back… every time you drop the rope in the tug of war between your Inner Critic and your Wise Inner Being, your cellular inflammation dies down and your telomeres get a little bit longer.
So if you want your skin to look better, fast…?
Move where you want to move.
Sell the house or rent it out.
Trust that you’ll figure it out. Trust that it will all come together. Trust that everything is always working out for you.
Quit that job. Or put yourself out there for that new, scarier job.
Stop wringing your hands and start doing your dream.
Speak up for yourself. Say what you mean. Ask for what you need.
You might even need to divorce that person. Or those parents. Or those friends.
Or find your prodigal child and embrace them, so-called bad behavior and all.
Stop divorcing yourself.
Face the fear.
Do the damn thing.
Stop trying to evade your greatness. You can’t evade it, Brilliant One. It’ll just keep haunting you. You have no other choice but to give into it.
And if you only have the capacity to make one single decision differently today than you did yesterday in the interest of causing your physical body to age in reverse, make this one:
Stop saying yes when you really mean no.
Stop saying yes when you really mean no.
Stop saying yes when you really mean no.
And just watch the frown lines disappear.
Let me know how it goes.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: *These are the Daily Rituals and practices I guide my people through in Life and Self Mastery, by the way, so get on the waiting list if you want in next time I open the doors.
P.P.S.: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.
Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq. The Inner Critic Coach™️ Founder + CEO of SoulTour
Here we go. We’re live on Instagram a day in advance of Transformation Tuesday because I have a big gorgeous photoshoot I’m gearing up for for Transformation Tuesday. As you can see, if you’re watching this video, I have like every piece of jewelry that I’ll be wearing in this shoot, actually not even, but at one moment in time. So that’s fun.
I thought I’d come on early also, because I got a note from this wonderful client that I’m working with.
She is a spiritual and psychological teacher in her own right, I do coach and teach and consult with a lot of other coaches and teachers and transformational entrepreneurs. And she’s working on a book that’s kind of the culmination of like 20 years plus of her own personal work and her own work with others.
And so she sent me this email this morning. And as I read it in the hot tub this morning after I dropped the baby off, and before I start working, I get in the hot tub and I get in the sauna and steam room.
And as I read it, I was like, wow, she’s definitely not the only person who has these issues front of mind right now on their hurts right now. So I sent her a note. And it was like, “Hey, here’s some things that are really specific for you.” And then I also wanted to share in a more general way with all of you.
So this is your Transformation Tuesday lesson, even though you may be seeing me on Monday on Instagram. What we’re going to talk about today is ways of being for when you don’t feel like you’re being productive enough. And it’s Monday morning. So I know she ain’t the only person who had this issue.
So she, you know, specifically says a bunch of things, including, we’re working on this book, and we’re at the very beginning.
So she says she’s feeling a little anxious, she’s got some feelings of overwhelm. It’s got some feelings of feeling a little bit lost in the woods. But she’s trusting the process. And that’s one beautiful thing about many of the people I get to work with one on one is that she’s pretty advanced in her own growth work. So she knows how to breathe into the process. She knows how to allow what wants to come through to come through.
But she said this one sentence that reminded me of like every human I know, she says I think my struggle switch gets activated when I feel like I’m not producing enough.
So I wanted to speak to that. These are literally the thoughts that came to my mind as I was in the hot tub. I had my big red book with me in that tub. And I made some notes that I wanted to share with you.
All right. So first is, those of you who’ve taken a program with me know that I take issue with the concept of productivity in general, because it comes from enslavement culture.
I know that may sound harsh or controversial to some folks. But it’s also the truth. You can literally go online and find historically that the idea of productivity, the idea of humans as resources, the idea of people’s work equals their worth comes from the enslavement era here in the United States. There was actually a guy who published these charts where the overseers could keep track of how much people were outputting every year.
And by virtue of keeping track of each enslaved human being’s output, they would determine how to treat that person, that would determine whether to beat that person, they would determine how much more to ask of that person to output the next year. And it turns out it was wildly effective at increasing the output of cotton picked by enslaved human beings every year.
It was also wildly effective at encoding in the collective unconscious, the idea that you need to be productive all of the time meaning producing all of the time. So I have a very, very strong issue with that concept.
You are not here to be a good little cog. You are you know an iconic creator and conduit for something that is coming from Source through you.
There’s this beautiful Audrey Lorde quote about how the Master’s House will never be dismantled by the Master’s tools. And if you are listening to me, if you’re watching me on Instagram, if you are you know my actual client that I’m speaking this to, your work is liberation work. It is liberating for you, it is liberating for that your audiences, and they get a contact high off from your work of the energy that you were in as you created the work. Okay? So you really cannot create liberating work for your people, liberating beautiful things until you start to click into and get into that energy of Creation and fruitfulness and fruition versus productivity. Okay. And so then you need to learn how to create.
What does that mean? It means you got to learn how to create the way creation is created, the way creation is created is real in nature. And in divine mind is like, seeds are planted, or bees drop pollen, okay.
And then like, they go underground for a bit for a minute, things get things are dark all around for a minute, as like nourishment comes through the soil as other collaborative components of divine mind of nature of Source of Spirit of All That Is. Come join your creative party, right.
And so water comes, sunlight comes, nutrition, nourishment comes through the soil, and it takes time. And all of that time is not time growing above ground.
In my newsletters, I have told the stories over the years of the bamboo that grows for all those years, only growing its root systems totally dormant from appearing from the top. And then all of a sudden, all of this height begins to grow above ground. Right?
This is the same if you’ve ever heard Abraham Hicks talk about if you were the farmer and you planted the seeds for the kernels of corn, and then you dug it up every single time you got frustrated or impatient with it, you would never grow anything right?
If you were looking for productivity, nothing would ever have a chance to really grow.
Alright, I see someone on here saying she’s working on really committing this time to doing my Do Your Dream program. And yes, Do Your Dream is actually a perfect companion to this conversation that we’re having right now. And it is validation for you from All That Is, from Source, from Spirit.
That you are in the right place at the right time. If you’re starting Do Your Dream over, we’re actually going to do a new live version of Do Your Dream later in the year called “Do the damn thing.” And I think it is also a perfect companion program to the original Do Your Dream, the recorded version which you have access to. So I give thanks for you too.
So yeah, I think productivity, you can begin to let that concept die.
That may actually be some of the work that you’re calling to write this book, client of mine, your callings, your dreams, your soulful dreams, your sacred contracts are trying to do the work in you of dissolving out that productivity culture and cultural conditioning.
So also let me just say a few other things. When you approach a project like my client’s book, whatever your dream callings and sacred contracts are, you should feel overwhelmed. If you didn’t feel overwhelmed, you probably wouldn’t really be understanding your assignment.
If you didn’t feel like you’re hitting your struggles which are slipping on, if you didn’t feel some level of discomfort because you’re stepping outside of your comfort zone, I would be concerned that you didn’t understand exactly what we were here to do.
We are here to create things that will bring liberation wholeness, joy, reclamation of the Divine to this generation and to future generations.
That is the work we are doing. And to you, first and foremost, to you. Okay so like it’s not a small thing we’re setting out to do, it is outside of your comfort zone all transformation is. So you know that if you’re hitting your resistance, if you’re hitting your struggle switch, if your inner critic is sparking on, if you are hitting imposter syndrome, you are doing it right, you are on the right track. If you are hitting that place of fear, like struggle switch, like “oh my gosh, what am I doing?” That is always a sore. The root cause of that feeling is always fear and all of that fear is exhilaration at your own coming expansion. All of that fear is unintegrated excitement.
Okay, and the only way you can integrate the unintegrated excitement, the unintegrated exhilaration, your own expansion is to wholeheartedly just it’s as in chair, do the words. It’s as in hot tub, let your inner pipeline open up.
If you feel a little lost in the woods, that’s because there’s no blueprint for where you’re going. There is no precise. Now I’ve got a roadmap for you, but it’s a flexible one. There is no precise exact checklist or instruction list for the life of radical liberation, radical wholeness, radical well-being spiritually, physically, radical prosperity, wealth, health, wisdom, you know, full creative self-expression, there’s no blueprint for that life.
You don’t probably know anyone that’s living that most people do not know anyone who is living that life in total integrity.
All right. So there’s no checklist for it, which is why you start to feel a little lost in the woods at the beginning of this process.
All right, there’s no checklist there’s no blueprint, but I got you on some mentorship, some assistance, some guidance, some tools, and what you do have and can always trust in is that there is a pipeline.
Okay, there is not a blueprint, there is a pipeline. And that pipeline is within you. You possess running up the inside of your spirit, an inner, limitless reservoir and pipeline through which all inspiration, all creative power, all divine intelligence, all the limitless love that you know, drapes, so that is your divine inheritance that flows through every cell of your body if you can learn to let it, you have that pipeline within you.
And productivity, culture, tracking, rushing, judging your process, all that stuff does is clog up the pipeline and constrict it. So what that what is trying to come through you cannot come through you, okay.
And so the practices you know, the daily ritual practices of sitting, the practices of freewriting, practices of prompted journaling, all the feminine divine feminine self-care practices of like closing out the world a bit getting in the Steam Room, turning inward reflection, pause and reflection.
I saw an email from Peloton this week, they said they took a bunch of their live classes off the calendar so that the whole company could have a moment of pause and reflection. And I was like, I don’t know how it’s gonna go for them. But what I do know is that is a very countercultural, and it is actually a mature divine feminine trait to take moments sacred pause, turn inward, reflect.
Okay, those things feel like they’re taking more time allowing yourself to write a really messy rough draft of whatever you’re writing or create a really messy, rough draft of whatever you’re creating.
That feels like it’s taking more time. But the truth is, it’s opening your inner pipeline. It’s opening you up to inspired ideas, it’s opening you up to golden threads of inspiration to drop in and flow in.
Right. And so I wanted to share a tiny bit about my own process, because I do these things now, they are matter of ritual for me, not habit, but ritual.
So I wanted to share, because I know many of you know me in my work, and you know that I’m prolific.
Depending on where I’m at and what projects I’m working on, I can write, you know, for years, I’ve written on average 20 or 25,000 words, a week, a normal book right now is about 50 in the marketplace today is like 50 or 60,000 words. So I’m writing about half a book every week. And it’s good.
It’s good, y’all know I ain’t humble. I’m thinking humble is cute. So it’s like very good writing. And I will tell you, I spend about three to five times as much time, every day, every week, and on every project, managing my state of openness, getting into that place of inspiration.
I spend three to five times as much time on cultivating that openness and inspired state and flow state. And getting back into connection with All That Is getting back into connection with my sacred strengths and gifts and talents and geniuses and inner genius and unleashing that inner genius. I spend three to five times as much time doing that as I spend actually writing. Three to five times. That’s why I only coach and teach and take meetings one day a week.
So like today, I spent till about 10:30 this morning just getting into the state. I only have childcare till like I mean, I have it for a lot longer than I use it. But I only have childcare, you know, I’ll go pick her up at like maybe 3, but that’s okay. Because by 10:30, 11 I’m so deep in my zone of genius that I’m creating. I’m like Hamilton like I’m running out of time but it feels like I’ve got all the time in the world.
Someone on Instagram is saying, “Tell me who that is.” It’s someone I know if you spin 1425 love she loves the habit versus ritual reframe here in SoulTour Landia in the metaphysician Landia we do ritual, versus just habit.
You have some habits. But habits are sort of automatic and mindless. Ritual is sacred and meaningful. It’s like we are setting this apart and saying this is an important meaningful thing. That’s what we’re doing.
So I invite you to trade in your concept of productivity. For the concept of fruitfulness, a fruitful creation. And fruitful creation has seeds, it’s cyclical, it’s seasonal, you’re going to take the time to get into the flow mode, you’re going to take the time to let things flow, you’re going to let the early writing early creating be bad, you’re going to understand that your assignment in the earliest stage is not just to get things out, it’s to get yourself in a state of back in connection, have tuned in and tapped back into your own natural strengths and power and work so that you can get the flow going.
Alright, and these are spiritual muscles. There is never a need for any judgment about whether you’ve been doing it right or wrong.
Truly the reason you have these dreams is not even so that the book can get created or so the thing can business can get out in the world. It’s that those dreams really want to do work in you including having that career in you of teaching you to deeply in your body and your spirit trust that divine order and divine timing are real. They run the show around here. And they are in your favor all the time. All the time. All the time. All the time all the time.
I love Tosha Silver says “even your delays are benefiting you.”
Even the things you feel like are you slowing down, are you procrastinating, even that benefits you in the end if you do it this way. Okay, great.
Ashley, thank you. She says she’s a vocal participant, a serious lover of things that I do. And you’ve been following for a couple of years. I cherish you too. This is co-creation, we’re not just doing that. I’m not just out, you’re doing this in my living room on my own. There is an energy of co-creation here. And so I love that it’s good for me to know your name. Ashley. Thank you.
So before I sign off, I just want to share a couple of the declarations that I do every day that I think help put you into the practice of these principles that I’ve taught on this session.
When I wake up in the morning, I say a lot of things and one of the most important is that, “I give thanks that the divine genius plan for our lives me and my family, my me and my clients me and my business, me and my team and my vendors, I give thanks that the divine genius plan for our lives now comes to pass under grace, overcome seas, and imperfect, wonderful, surprising and delightful ways. I now release resistance to every element and stage of that divine genius plan. And I give thanks for knowing that right now today, in every moment of this day is an element and stage of the Divine genius plan. So I now surrender my calendar to divine order and timing.”
Now, so those are a couple of those declarations that I use all the time to get me on the same page and on the same calendar and on the same timeline as divine order and timing.
And I will tell you that once I really am practicing that declaration a lot. There’s my declaration shift over the months and years. When I practice that one very quickly, you know, it’s working because your day stops going your way.
What you wake up and plan to do is rarely what actually happens that day. Like I didn’t plan to do this live right now. My plan was to do a live for Transformation Tuesday, tomorrow on Tuesday. But then my client sent this email, and it had a couple things in it. And I was like no, she needs an answer to that now. I feel an answer to that now.
There’s somebody who needs to hear this now. And I come on Instagram Live and Ashley’s like, oh, I needed this exact confirmation of what I’ve been doing this exact time because I’m starting Do Your Dream again. And oh my gosh, this is exactly. That’s how this works.
I get that email 20 times a week seriously, somebody being like, “Oh my gosh, you said this exact thing that I needed to hear at that exact moment” and it came into my inbox or my you know, Insta feed at the exact moment in time. And I’m like, right. That’s because I’m surrendering my calendar to divine order and timing every single day.
So yeah, it means that my best-laid plans for my day don’t always go that way. But usually, my day goes a million times better than anything like, like the old Bible verse says anything that I could ask, think of or imagine, like my actual day turns out way better than that. And it’s more joyful than that in the work I create, whether it’s a video, whether it’s writing, whatever it is, is 10 times better.
Alright, so it’s 11:11 on the west coast of North America right in this moment, which I think is a perfect time to end this session.
I will see you guys on the next transformation Tuesday. I love you. Keep your head up, keep your heart out and know that I am like in the lab cooking some delicious things up for us to rendezvous together on and with.
Yes, these declarations are a practice of total trust. And I promise you when you begin to trust something greater than you for the plans for your day, and for your life, all you do is open your inner pipeline and let everything this universe is trying to get to you. You just open up and let it in.
Alright, I love you. I’ll see you soon.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.
Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq. The Inner Critic Coach™️ Founder + CEO of SoulTour
If you want your feelings of Big “Dream Deferred” energy to dissolve and transmute into Big Dream energy, you must understand a few things.
You must understand that your big dreams—your most delectable, most audacious life dreams on any subject—are part of the million line-item long spiritual curriculum of things you came into this life to experience.
We call this curriculum your Sacred Contract.
Your Big Dreams are essential components of your cosmic assignments—albeit an assignment the larger, Divine Ocean assigned to the smaller Divine Droplet that is you, so it’s more like a self-assignment than an externally-imposed assignment.
Know this: You DO have an assignment.
More accurately, you have assignments, plural.
Your Big Dreams are on the list of your sacred contract assignments, but MOST of your Sacred Contracts are not Huge Big Things to build, perform or create.
Your sacred contract—your assignments—include everything you came into life to be, do, have, learn, create, experience, savor, grieve and enjoy. So they number in the millions, or trillions or even more.
So know this, too: In order to do your Big Dreams, you’ll need to break programming, break patterns, break from culture, break your old self-sabotaging thought patterns and action (or inaction) habits, and break your resistance to your own highest good.
In other words, your Big Dreams—if you have the courage to step toward them—will require you to learn and unlearn what you need to learn and unlearn, to become who you came here to become.
This, Brilliant One, is a process.
And processes have stages.
So here’s another principle to catch: At any given moment, you must understand your assignment for THIS stage of reclaiming your wholeness and re-learning how to be your Big Self.
And catch this principle #5: You must continuously recalibrate your understanding of your assignment for THIS stage… this season, if you will.
Here’s #6: Best practice is to refrain from judging, tracking or grading your progress, because you’re basically always nailing it.
You can’t get it wrong.
You’re here in this life, creating.
And when unwanted outcomes occur… when things take longer than you think they should… under the principles of Divine Order and Divine Timing, every single one of these plot twists and delays can ultimately benefit you (if you decide to let nothing be for nothing).
But IF you must grade your own assignment, make sure you’re grading yourself on the assignment for THIS stage.
Here’s what I mean.
A friend of mine recently decided to commit to stop self-silencing and say what she means, particularly with her partner.
And so she did.
And she reported back that the first conversation she initiated as part of her new commitment to free-and-clear communications was a disaster.
That she timed the conversation poorly.
That she didn’t know what to say, and blurted some shit out.
That she got flustered.
That her partner didn’t take it well and didn’t agree to her requests.
She felt like she was failing as a skillful communicator.
But I told her I’d give her an A+ as a baby, fledgling, fully self-expressing human.
And I shared with her my own process of building the skills and muscles I’ve built that allow me to honor The Commitment I made about 15 years ago to fully express myself. (We’ll talk more about The Commitment soon).
I told her how when I first made The Commitment and first started practicing free-and-clear communications, and first started setting boundaries, I was kind of like This Kitty:
I looked sweet. My intentions and heart were pure as the driven snow. And I was so un-skillful, I would just blow shit up, leaving a whole lot of spiritual shrapnel behind.
And then I committed to my Daily Ritual. I started using the sitting time and writing time to get clear on what parts of a conversation were mine to have with my own Inner Being—and which parts I needed to bring to the other person.
I got clearer and clearer on what hard conversations needed to be had, and when.
I started to practice what I learned in Necessary Endings, including the nuances involved in detecting whether you need to end a pattern or a relationship.
I started studying Non-Violent Communications and would literally script out my hard conversations before I had them, to get the energy of nervousness and fear worked out, and to go in with more confidence that I would be comprehensive and grounded in my talk.
I took The Four Agreements and committed to be impeccable with my words, which does not mean perfect but does mean to never weaponize your words.
And I did all of that for years, whilst practicing free-and-clear communications in real time, allll the time, letting my spirit get the new wiring and feedback loops of how terrible it felt when I didn’t honor The Commitment and how free-and-clear I came to feel inside all the time when I did.
And now it is much, MUCH easier for me to identify hard conversations that need to be had, initiate them, and have them skillfully.
It is much, MUCH easier to do this without manipulating, and without fretting about the outcome…
Without worry about other people’s discomfort…
Without worrying whether they can handle it…
Without worrying about pleasing them or upsetting them…
Without worrying about whether they will withhold or withdraw their love and approval of me…
And even without worrying about whether they’ll ultimately do what I want them to do.
But at the beginning, I told my friend, before you knew me?
And you know what?
In retrospect, I give Kitty Walking Away From Self-Created Explosion Tara an A+ just like I gave my friend.
Because at that stage my assignment was not to be a skillful, free-and-clear communicator and boundary creator.
At THAT stage, my assignment was to break generations-old patterns of self-silencing, self-divorcing, hiding my own light, and NOT speaking up for myself, saying what is true and asking for what I need.
And at THAT stage, I shined light. I dared to walk toward the chaos monsters that self-silencing had created in my own mind with open arms and warmth. I broke those patterns.
A++++++.
Listen: When your kid learns to ride a bike and falls down, you don’t shame them or tell them what a shit job they’re doing.
You don’t compare them to the folks in the Tour de France, or even the kids who have a year of bike-riding experience under their little belts.
You cheer them on for getting one single pedal rotation on their own before they realize they did that and lose balance.
Your heart soars when they pedal a few times even though they’ve still got training wheels on.
You are ELATED when you take the training wheels off and they can make it a hundred meters without you helping them keep their balance.
And when they fall down, AND GET BACK UP… that’s the win, because that’s all the assignment was!
So, if you’re trying to break old patterns that keep you small or hide your light…
And anytime you’re trying to step out of your comfort zone and let the New Beginnings begin…
Understand your assignment for that specific, transformational, breakthrough season, stage or moment.
Don’t let PERFORM, CONFORM, PRODUCE conditioning or culture have you judging yourself with advanced standards when you’re just a beautiful, baby, beginner.
Give yourself an A+ for breaking the pattern or breaking out of your comfort zone, even if the way you do it is way less masterful or beautiful than you usually do things.
Even if you feel a little like this:
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.
Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq. The Inner Critic Coach™️ Founder + CEO of SoulTour
Best Practice: For maximum integration of this Transformation Tuesday, I recommend reading AND listening to it at the same time. This has the happy side effect of making sure you don’t miss the things I speak but don’t write, or vice versa. Enjoy!
As I work on my first-ever fiction book and reimagine the SoulTour brand and art, I’ve been studying the ancient wisdom of the Maya, the Mexica (Aztec) and the Toltecs: the spiritual traditions of mesoamerica, ancient Mexico—some of the oldest spiritual traditions in the world.
All three traditions had integral teachings rooted in the cardinal directions, which we modern Westerners think of as north, south, east and west.
I love the work of the writer and curandera (healer) Erika Buenaflor, who points out that these ancients knew something that we’ve forgotten.
To them, there were actually five cardinal directions, not four.
North, south, east, west… and center, the most important of them all.
That’s why every Mexican town with a preserved old town had a center, The Zócalo.
And I know this to be true, despite the “decentralization” that’s in the collective consciousness these days; that EVERYTHING has a center.
If you tend to the center, if it is whole and sacred, everything else lines up and falls into place, and even seemingly grave wounds or dysfunctions in the periphery can and will be healed.
But where the center is wounded, neglected or missing? The periphery can’t get right, no matter what.
In the coming season of humanity and of your life, you will need to remember this, Brilliant One:
Everything has a center.
And that includes you.
Your center is your soul.
That’s your Wise Inner Being. Your True, Sacred Self. The offspring-of-God, droplet of the Divine part of you.
This is the BIG you — the REAL you.
Everything else—and I do mean EVERYTHING else you think you may know about yourself —is fleeting and changeable.
And that means everything else is HEALABLE.
Say, for example, that the people who raised you were also savage to you as a young child. This is against the natural, Divine order of things. So it creates chaos in a child’s mind when those whose actions toward the child are what the child will encode as love are also very abusive and unreliable in their ability to provide love and survival stuff to the kid. That chaos in the child’s mind grows up and can create a disorganized attachment style long into adulthood.
Lifelong pattern? Sure. Difficult to disrupt relational template with the world? Yes.
And also… it is healable.
Here’s the principle I want you to catch, Brilliant One:
Diagnoses, personality types, attachment styles and your relational templates with the world, your patterns, your archetypes, all of these things CAN be useful so long as you keep them in their proper place.
So long as you let them be your servant, and not your master, and you can use them to great effect.
Labels are pattern spotting. Not character evaluation, not moral blue ribbons or demerits. It is not a stamp of worthiness or unworthiness.
There are two great uses of these labels, like knowing you are diagnosed ADHD, on the spectrum or bipolar, or just knowing you’re an introvert, or an accumulator in the Sacred Money Archetypes, or you have a perfectionism problem in my Inner Critic archetypes.
There are two really, really good uses of these labels that do further your spiritual progress.
The first is to be witnessed. There is a powerful, underestimated magic and resonance in hearing someone describe with vivid language and understanding a challenging, or painful inner experience you’ve dealt with in isolation for a lifetime.
Just being witnessed like that is often a beautiful step or even leap along the path toward radical self-acceptance, which is truly the only acceptance that matters. And it’s the only one that matters, because a) living for external validation is the express train to suffering and b) normalization is not even that interesting when the cultural norm is demoralized and disconnected and undesirable.
The second great use of labels is it empowers you to resource-spotting. I have three neurodivergent children. And that 3 out of 3, I am literally batting a thousand because I am very aware that all of my children have some real, unfair advantages in this world by virtue of their God-given neurodivergences. So the second great use of these labels is resource-spotting and one thing that I’m very aware of is by virtue of having the diagnosis, you can unlock resources. You can unlock health. When you know what to call an experience, you can Google it. You can read about it, understand it and find ways to live the experience that are beneficial to you.
I’m gonna tell you a very personal story that illustrates what I mean.
At the end of 2021, I was diagnosed with a complex medical condition that all the doctors involved agree I’ve been complaining about since AT LEAST 2007. Which means I’ve probably had it 20 years, possibly my whole 47 years of life.
Turns out that all these years, all my hippie DIY concoctions and “weird” health practices have actually been holding my body together until the doctors could catch up.
Fortunately, it’s very treatable. And also fortunately, the treatments are working. But I digress.
One of the strange symptoms of this condition—non-radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, if you’re curious—is difficulty breathing.
For years, I’ve complained that I wasn’t getting enough air down at the bottom of my lungs.
The doctors had me wear a heart monitor around for awhile. They told me I had runner’s heart where they said I had worked out so much that my heart rate was low, and my heart was throwing extra beats and that was causing chest pains. They did lung x-rays. They told me to do more breathwork. I even thought for years that I was just holding my breath as a habit, as a remnant of an old childhood trauma.
Until one day I got this diagnosis. And down the research rabbit hole I went. This condition is known to cause spinal fusion, to limit spine mobility and—hold up wait a minute—to cause difficulty breathing because it limits rib mobility.
So one night while I was in bed, giving thanks for my plasma treatments and self-injections, I also noticed how tight my chest was, grabbed my phone and googled RIB MOBILITY.
And voila. At the top of the search results was the YouTube video of, get this: a physical therapist who specializes in treating GOLFERS who need as big a range of rib mobility as they can get, to power their swing.
I was like, BET. Clicked play. Sat up in bed and did what he said.
Cross your right leg over your left. Check.
Put your hands in sit-up position behind your head.
Turn to the right.
Drop your elbow down 45 degrees.
Check check check.
Now, he said: Take a deep breath in.
I’ll never forget what happened when I took that long inhale, Brilliant One.
I HEARD MY RIB CAGE CRACK OPEN, RIB-BY-RIB.
Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
My eyes opened wide and I’m pretty sure I actually looked around to see if anyone else could hear what I was hearing. But no one else was in the room.
I actually had a momentary thought of “Oh shit, did I just break myself???”
And then I exhaled.
And kept following his instructions.
He said you should have a good 20 degrees of additional rotation now, he said.
And dagnabbit I DID!
I turned my torso some more, dropped my elbow again, breathed in… and pop-pop, ribs unlocked, a little less dramatic this time.
Wow.
I repeated the whole thing on the left, just marveling at the wildness of this experience.
When I was done on both sides, I laid back down in bed and just breathed, and I just layed there and I thought, “Ah, I give thanks for this perfect night. I give thanks for the gift of life” just reveled in the freedom of breathing freely, in and out. No catch. No hitch in my giddyup.
So as you see, the diagnosis was just a tool—a divining rod that put me hot on the trail of the actual knowledge I needed to unlock my breath.
So, anytime you think “Ugh… I can’t do that. I have ADHD or I’m an introvert, or I have a disorganized attachment style, will I ever be capable of a solid, loving relationship?”
Remember these things:
Your labels are not your limits.
Your labels are your levers.
They are tools to use to unlock an inner well of self-compassion and self-understanding.
They are tools to use to find and access the resources that can upgrade your life, because it is precious and the resources for you to live to your fullest potential ARE out there.
Your labels are not your limits.
Your labels are your levers.
And that’s all they are.
The moment they start making you feel limited…
The moment they become your reason for not doing things you desire…
The moment they start to feel like judgement cause for judgment or reason for shame…
Throw that shit away.
You have a center.
There is an unchanging core at the center of who you are.
And that center is not your diagnosis, it is SOUL and Source, offspring of All That Is, fractal and fragment of the limitless love, the infinite intelligence and the Creative Power that formed all worlds.
THAT’s what you are. That’s your center, that’s your soul color.
We all forget sometimes. It is the human condition.
But now is the season to re-member: to reclaim and retrieve all the parts of your soul, to unpack the pieces you’ve been shoving down and silencing to get love since you were 4 and nurture all of those pieces into coherence, cohesion, alignment and alliance.
So that every part of you is lined up in the same direction. And great inner peace and power and focus become available to you.
When you do that, no matter what your labels or styles are or your diagnosis are, you will quickly come to know this fundamental truth about who you really are:
That NO THING is too good for you.
And that, my friend, is when your healing will accelerate, And your life will take off. And all them labels can just come along for the ride.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.
Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq. The Inner Critic Coach™️ Founder + CEO of SoulTour
Have you ever felt like you were afraid of your own Big Dreams?
I see it all the time: Smart, successful people who are crushing the game for other people keep failing to reach their goals, because the goals they are setting aren’t really theirs.
People are setting goals they hate. They are setting their mama’s goals and their grandmama’s goals…
And the pattern I see is smart, successful people who stay living their shadow lives and working their shadow careers, because their Inner Critic is so active and spiritually self-silencing, they either can’t get clear on their purpose, or they set soulless goals they don’t even really care about
And that’s why they don’t achieve them.
Because their own Big Dreams spark fear.
The fear of failing.
The fear of success.
The fear you might die still full of un-created ideas.
The fear you might die without really having LIVED.
Your true, sacred, BIG Dreams, by definition, will make you feel exposed. Vulnerable. At risk.
They will spark fear.
But why?
The perform-conform-produce-to-prove-your-worthiness lies of this culture have more than a little bit to do with why you may feel afraid of your own Dreams.
Because you’re good at performing. You’re GOOD at getting external validation. You’re good at getting raises and promotions.
And that becomes a template for your LIFE and for your WORLD.
Perform, perform, perform >>, get external validation >> WHEW! Feel like I’m OK. Feel certainty.
So it’s untethering to even contemplate letting all of that external approval go.
How will you get the greenlight to feel OK, if you opt out of the same structures and agreements that bind you and constrain you and keep your genius and your joy small.
The other thing that’s comforting about the shadow life is that there’s a blueprint for it.
And there’s a blueprint for the “Dream Deferred” life. You go to college. You get a job. You get performance reviews. You get a raise. You get a better job.
You trade notes with other people about the fantasy of moving to Belize or when you’ll finally have enough money in the bank to be who you really are.
“Someday”, you think. And you keep thinking. And you keep thinking.
So it’s scary to wonder what north star you’ll navigate by if you get off that treadmill?
How will you know what to do next when you’re no longer living the blueprint, Dream Deferred life?
Scary.
If you’ve ever gotten an inkling that there’s a Big Dream in your heart, and felt an immediate surge of fear, you are not alone.
We’re afraid of ending up weird and by ourselves if we opt out of the chronic fear, outrage, scarcity and unworthiness everyone else seems to be okay living in.
We’re afraid we’ll vomit or die if we try to start a business or write a book and it doesn’t go well.
But in my work helping people get their Big Dream Energy back, here’s what most of them are really afraid of:
You are afraid you will fail at doing the work their Big Dreams will require you to do.
Almost everyone would rather stay in a chronic state of wanting it and not even going for it than pursue your Big Dream and feel like you’re failing at doing the work your Big Dreams require you to do.
And THAT fear surfaces a really important fallacy:
You think your Big Dreams will require you to do a bunch of work.
But the truth is that your Big Dreams want to do a bunch of work within YOU.
Symbolic work. Psychological work. Neurobiological work. Spiritual work within you.
Shadow work. Trauma healing. Ancestral curse-breaking within you. Through you.
Healing the primal wounds of your heart and soul. Within you.
Healing the primal wounds within the collective unconscious… through YOU.
Your Big Dreams want to take you to these depths. They want to take you to some extremes.
And yes: This is some heavy stuff, the inner work of building the capacity to do your dreams.
But we don’t do all of this deep work for the sake of it. We do it for the DREAM. We do it for the sake of our lives, our liberation, our JOY.
I don’t want you to do your shadow work for the sake of it.
We do it so we can be and do and have and learn and create the things we came here for.
We do all this deep, inner work NOT to get STUCK in the inner work so we can come back into our real lives, and play tennis and run, and surf and raise children and have wonderful love affairs and have wonderful lifelong partnerships, and wear beautiful clothes and travel and write and sing and dance and build empires and brands and homes… and we do all this deep inner work so we can do all of those things masterfully: with the tools, skills, rituals and healing we got from the deep stuff.
Don’t get stuck in your season of shadow work, Brilliant One.
Do not get stuck in the shadows.
The Psalm says “yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” It doesn’t say, “yea, though I pitched a tent, set up camp, built a home and a village and a nation in the valley of the shadow of death and lived there for generations.”
And just to stay Old Testament for a minute, even the Israelites only wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, Brilliant One.
They did get to the Promised Land eventually.
Your Big Dreams are your symbolic promised land.
And ultimately, the work they want to do within us is not just the shadow work.
Your Big Dreams want to do sacred light work within you, too.
They want you to live in the light and the joy.
Your Big Dreams ain’t just about the before and the during… there’s an AFTER to this.
Not one in which everything is super perfect and nothing unwanted ever happens, but one in which you get to reap the rewards and get to lick up the juice from the squeeze of the fruits of all that deep inner work.
There is a time to get out of the shadows and come back into the light.
And I want you to know that you and me and that one and even that trouble maker over there, all of us doing our Big Dreams—not just the inner work to get the capacity to do our Big Dreams, but that’s how humanity evolves.
Doing your dreams is how YOU, individual brilliant human, reclaim the fragments of your soul and come into a new season of wholeness, liberation and joy.
And it’s how the old, rotten institutions of our world will be replaced with a new world of the wondrous.
It’s how all art gets created.
How science progresses.
Individual human people doing their inner work and then doing their Big Dreams is how the next generation of humans shows up just being… different than all those who came before, in wonderful ways.
So don’t pitch your tent and build your village in the valley of the shadows, Brilliant One.
And don’t let the fear of your Big Dreams stop you from answering your own personal, cosmic call to adventure.
I want you to let the love for your own as-yet-uncreated Big Dreams energize the journey of your awakening soul—aka your SoulTour.
It is a journey of recalibration, actualization, through the shadows, through every corner of your Life and your Self…and into alignment.
It is a journey where you then let your Big Dreams lure you back out into the light.
Back into your LIFE.
Along your journey, keep in your heart these words of The Writer-Philosopher Queen Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote: “even if you are not ready for day, it cannot always be night.”
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.
Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq. The Inner Critic Coach™️ Founder + CEO of SoulTour
All love and all the power that formed all worlds.
All wealth and plenty.
It’s what you are. That’s what your thoughts and emotions are. That’s what your ideas are.
Energy vibrating.
That’s what the air is. The ocean and the dirt. Every object, animate and inanimate, that makes up what the author Laura Day calls consensus reality is.
I’ve noticed a thing about humans in the Western world: People really, really like shortcuts.
People ask me things, like: Wow. How did you learn how to be unattached from the opinions of others?
And I usually say something like: Oh, well I read this book and practiced this Spiritual Strategy and it was fast. It only took like 20 years. Okay 25.
Because I’ve also noticed a thing about the art and science of the SoulTour—the journey of your soul, waking up from the trances that hide your light and your best life—there are no shortcuts.
The healing of your primal heart wounds takes time.
It takes time to stop living in unlove and start letting Divine love in.
The building of spiritual and practical skills for mastering your life and yourself until those skillsjust feel like how you be… that takes time.
It takes time to get the courage to head into the shadows of your inner landscape with what seems like the rinky-dink flashlight of your willingness to be aware of the things within you that scare you.
It takes time to see what needs seeing and say what needs saying.
And it takes time to get you bearings back after you untether yourself from the human suffering hamster wheel of seeking other people’s validation, and from the traumatized thought habits that create very low expectations for life.
It takes time to imagine a new way to be, and it takes time to give yourself permission to be that new, beautiful way (which turns out to be the way you came here… trailing clouds of glory, according to Wordsworth).
So all of this takes time.
And there are no shortcuts.
What there is is Divine Timing.
There are delays that benefit you.
And there are seasons of acceleration, too… these are the seasons that look to other people like you’re making a quantum leap in your life, but you know better.
These are those snap-together seasons, where all the inner work and outer work and practices and skills and healing you’ve been doing for decades or maybe lifetimes bear fruit that other people can see.
Catch this principle: Every snap-together season is an alignment season.
Those days when everything just falls into place? They don’t happen by total accident. They happen when you have a clear intention or desire, when you stay doing your inner work and outer work, and then when you get into alignment.
Those times when you just seem to stay winning, when you consistently get what you want?
Those are alignment moments.
Now. I’m not saying you never need to take any action, but what I am saying is that you will experience incredible progress on your Big Self’s Biggest Dreams when you emerge from the intensity of your shadow work and get into alignment with what you want.
Sometimes that alignment looks like moving to a new place and getting a new job and a new wardrobe.
Other times, it looks like taking scary little baby steps to buy the property that seems out of reach, and not letting your mother’s voice in your head talk you out of it at any step.
Sometimes, it looks like near-superhuman drive and focus on a specific outcome… other times, it looks like deep, serene surrender to let the cosmic cards fall where they may.
Right now, this era wants BOTH form us: Drive and surrender. Focused intention and detachment from the specific way it plays out.
That’s the formula for showing up in your life as your True, Sacred, BIG Self with total trust that everything is always working out for you.
And THAT, Brilliant One, is the formula for allowing your life to be benefitted and expanded and beautified and radically transformed, liberated and en-joyed by All That Is.
Show up. Let the barriers between Little You and Big You dissolve like butter melting in a pan.
Breathe. Allow every cold spot within you thaw. Allow every hard knot within you unfurl.
And know that today —2.22.22—is a particularly auspicious moment for Divine Alignment.
Two is the number closest to one—it’s an easier day than most for us to see our Big Selves and re-member who we really are. It’s a very good day to reclaim your whole Self and your Unlived Life.
Today is a day on which the spiritual winds are at our backs, helping nudge you and your life into alignment with your Big Dreams, so they can all merge into one, beautiful reality.
So today, do whatever it is that you know how to do to get yourself into maximum happy mode… maximum relaxed mode, maximum joy mode… maximum trust mode… maximum allowing mode.
Align to the Assistance that is trying to get to you right now. And let yourself be surprised and delighted by how it shows up.
If you want to have your so-called Quantum Leap, know that it is available to you, so long as you’re willing to invest a couple of decades into recalibrating, actualizing and aligning every cell of your being.
If you’re not willing, no worries: Life has a way of bringing you there in its own time.
But if you are willing—and chances are, if you’re even reading this, something inside you declared your willingness to walk the path of awakening long ago—allow me to take this opportunity, on 2.22.22 to share what I think of as the Quantum Leap Mantra… the most powerful alignment mantra there is.
Here it is:
Divine Order is now established in my mind, my body and my affairs.
Since I began speaking them every day about five years ago, these words have been radically reordering my brain, my physical body, my spirit, my children, my family, my finances, my home, my businesses, my relationships… my old trauma, my old dramas… my new capacities, all of it, in surprisingly comprehensive and world-rocking ways.
A lot of this alignment to Divine Order felt like chaos and crisis… but I stood in it nonetheless, knowing that crisis is turning point.
So I’ve learned to leverage crisis energy and transmute it into evolution energy: Big Dream Energy. Big Dream FULFILLMENT Energy, to be more accurate.
So, be advised. This is not a mantra to be thrown around lightly. Only use these words if you’re ready and willing to see what needs seeing, say what needs saying, and align to Divine Order in your mind, body and affairs.
I promise: It will take you to Promised Lands your conscious mind has never even dared to let itself dream about.
Until now.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.
Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq. The Inner Critic Coach™️ Founder + CEO of SoulTour
Every hour of your life could play out in trillions of ways.
The possibilities are limitless. And the specifics of how any given hour plays out is influenced by trillions of factors.
The single most important factor that influences how this hour, this day and this life plays out for you is what you focus your thoughts and attention on… generally and specifically.
To catch this principle, you do have to be willing to zoom out and look at the overarching journey of your life and your soul, which can unfold and be facilitated in wonderful ways even by very un-wonderful experiences.
In other words, even the unwanted events of your life can ultimately serve your Big Dreams and Sacred Contracts—the Bigger Picture—that the Big You came here to live out.
(Side note: This is why you’ve gotta be careful with readers, intuitives and clairvoyants. There are trillions of ways a day could play out. And even the best intuitive predictor is only seeing one of those ways. By telling you about what they see, they inevitably influence how YOU influence the field of possibilities by influencing what you think about and focus on. So if you do choose to talk with a predictor… choose someone who knows the power of their words and is wise and responsible about how they wield that power.)
All of that’s just for context.
Now.
When I wake up in the morning, and open my eyes…
And when Londyn wakes up and climbs into my bed to start the day…
And when I lead rituals, teach programs, start coaching sessions or kick off conferences…
I take a moment to energize the day’s possibilities very intentionally with these 7 powerful words:
WE GIVE THANKS FOR THIS PERFECT DAY.
I say this out loud every single day, and I say it before the day gets started… before I know how the events will play out.
And I don’t say this in an effort to make things turn out in any certain way. I say this because it is true.
I want to share with you why I say those words so often—WE GIVE THANKS FOR THIS PERFECT DAY—and why I teach you to declare this over and over again, every day. These words helped me heal from my ancestral and this-life trauma, they supported my process of recalibrating my inner landscape, they cultivated my inner peace during the hard work of liberation and they have helped radically transform my life.
In other words: This worked for me.
Please receive the rest of this as equal parts statement of INTENTION—understand the fullness of why I say this and think you should, too—and INCANTATION: as you hear this, you will feel some resonances, some knowings and some energies that you’ll need for this week and this season will activate and come forth in you in fuller ways.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day, we are no longer begging for scraps from the Universe.
And we’re not asking for the day to unfold in a Photoshopped, “for-the-Gram” version of perfection.
We are declaring our trust that the Divine Genius Plan for our lives can and will come to pass today, in perfect ways.
We are practicing releasing fear and anxiety into the field and allowing their energy to transform into intention, trust and desire.
We are declaring our trust in Divine Creative Power to activate the Genius within us in some way on this day, whether the Genius within us says to rest or to go get a bone broth… or to begin a masterwork.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we step into maximum receptivity and open our visual field to see the opportunities for that to happen as they arise, whether they arise in the form of an opportunity to break a contentious conversational script with our children and be the Great Parents we came here to be… or whether they arise in the form of a download that creates a synchronicity moment that lights up an opportunity to write the book or build the movement we so deeply desire to create.
When we give thanks for this perfect day BEFORE the day even gets started in earnest, we are agreeing with Divine Order and Divine Timing. We become a little less prone to judge and track our progress. We become a little less needful of the delusion that we control anything. We start looking for the wonderful things that we can extract from literally any experience.
And we begin to break the hold of time scarcity and let things take the time they take.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we begin to agree that Divine Order is being established and instilled within our cells, our minds, our lives, our families, our bank accounts, our businesses, our teams, our creative endeavors… all of our affairs… that our lives and the atoms of our experience are re-ordering and re-aligning to the Sacred Contracts and reasons we came.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day the moment we open our eyes, we cst a vote in the direction of knowing that EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS WORKING OUT FOR US, even as we learn to know that sometimes this alignment will look like destruction before it looks like creation… and sometimes it feels like loss, crisis, inner conflict and catastrophe until we shine light on the shadows, break the identities and dissolve the patterns that need dissolving for us to actualize our True, Sacred Self: the version of us that is maximum awake, maximum alive, maximum health, wealth, love and self-expression.
Maximum freedom. Maximum wholeness. Maximum joy. Maximum creative power.
When we heed these spiritual alarm clocks and wake up from the trances of culture, programming, trauma and fear… we begin to get glimpses into our REAL, heretofore unlived lives, and we get the cosmic green light that these REAL lives start right freaking now.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we surrender to Divine Order, without surrendering our power to create.
In fact, when we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we begin to prep. We paddle out to the surf break. We get ready to catch the wave of Creative Power that’s already trying to flow to us and through us. We get on the same page as all the assistance that’s trying to come.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we recalibrate our nervous systems. We downregulate the arousal. We open our Inner Pipeline to receive the inspired ideas and nudges and opportunities we couldn’t see before.
We allow the Divine Downloads to drop in and the natural next steps to light up.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we attune.
We get on the same radio station frequency as the wholeness, completion, liberation and joy that we want, and that we ARE.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we get in the psychological, emotional, thought-pattern and spiritual posture of “it’s already done, I can stop performing so damn hard now”.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we get into the thought mode of there’s nothing about me and there’s nothing about my past and there’s nothing about the world and there’s nothing about right now that needs to be fixed or changed or judged in this moment.
It’s all a cosmic play, unfolding in perfect timing.
And into the space that you create when you wake up and give thanks for this perfect day, inspiration can flow. It WILL flow. You can take action, from the place of creation and love and joy… and not scarcity or the fear of unwanted outcomes. And when the actions you take come from creation and love and joy and intentional alignment, what you create via these actions is more beautiful and more effective in the bread-and-butter world than anything you could ever create from fear.
This is the only mode of action from which your True Sacred Self—your Big Self—can begin to let your Little Self start dreaming your Big Dreams. This is the only mode from which you can begin to desire the most delectable desires… the ones that are written into the Sacred Contract, Divine Genius plan for your life.
And hey—you never have to worry about whether the dream you’re dreaming is your truest, biggest dream, because the small ones and the resistance they spark is precisely that triggers you to shed what needs shedding and heal what needs healing for the Big Dreams to drop in. And the small, misaligned dreams and the actions you take in service of them is how you learn, grow, get the skills and practices you’ll need when your Big Dreams DO light up, which they always do in Divine Order and Timing.
So you can trust your Wise Inner Being to have you dream what you need to dream at any given moment to become what you came here to become. And you can trust the Little Self goals to transmute into your Big Dreams, in Divine Timing, as you take little steps and big leaps.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… you set yourself up to let no thing, no hour, no event and no day be wasted on you.
You set yourself up to milk every moment for SOMETHING.
Sometimes, for wisdom and clarity.
And sometimes… for play. For lightness. For opportunities to rollerskate outside with the other 50 year old women at the park. For the chance to give a BRILLIANT piggy-back ride to a toddler. For the chance to hug a pug or savor some art or watch a whale or soak in a bath.
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we set up a platform from which you can do some shadow work when you need to, and from which you can emerge from the shadows when the time is right.
When we wake up and give thanks for the perfect day, we tune into the signals that tell us when the time is right to set down heavy and turn to lightness. (Not light vs. dark… Light vs. HEAVY.)
When we wake up and declare that today is a perfect day… we give ourselves and everyone we know a gift.
HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1:
Put this on a post-it on your bedside table: WE GIVE THANKS FOR THIS PERFECT DAY.
Practice saying this aloud, even in a whisper, the moment you wake up: WE GIVE THANKS FOR THIS PERFECT DAY.
Write daily in your journal or at the top of your to-do list for the week: WE GIVE THANKS FOR THIS PERFECT DAY.
And set an alarm for every hour on the hour to say this to yourself, one time or 100 times: EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS WORKING OUT FOR ME.
Then, look for ways that this is true, all day throughout the day, all week. Or maybe all day everyday for the next 40 or 60 years.
Whatever works for you!
HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT #2:
Give an actual gift to yourself every day for the next 12 days.
Could be a thing you buy, not as a reward for closing a deal, but just because you want it and you can.
Could be a meeting you cancel because it feels shackles-off.
Could be getting a sitter so you can write or hike or… whatever.
Just make sure it feels like a gift. And make sure you thank yourself for giving it.
Go ahead… put it on your calendar. One gift a day.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.
Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq. The Inner Critic Coach™️ Founder + CEO of SoulTour
Londyn modeled something kinda deep this morning when she yelled, from the bathtub:
“Mama! Bring me a strawberry burrito!”
She didn’t hesitate, dither or ask her Facebook friends whether it was ok to ask for a strawberry burrito.
She didn’t take the time to wonder whether a strawberry burrito is really a thing.
She didn’t think of all the potential unwanted outcomes wanting a strawberry burrito could possibly create, and talk herself out of it. She just had an inspired idea—a desire—and she asked for it.
(Whether she got it or not is actually irrelevant to the self-honoring in the self-expression, so … I’ll wait to send you a photo of her strawberry burrito another week.)
The saddest thing in the world to me is to watch someone whose Inner Critic has robbed them of their ability to speak up for themselves and ask for what they want and need.
I’ve worked with multi-multi-millionaires who can’t even say what they REALLY want… to themselves.
So anytime you have an inspired desire pop into your awareness and it feels overwhelming, scary, too self-indulgent, weird or otherwise unavailable to you, I want you to think of Londyn.
I want you to think of Londyn placing her cosmic order for a strawberry burrito in the bathtub and then kicking back and living her Actual Baby Best Life while the higher forces that run the place figured out how to make it happen.
Let me speak my Strawberry Burrito Blessing over you:
May you feel this level of freedom to reinvent your life by reimagining what you REALLY want.
May you feel this level of worthiness to let yourself desire what you REALLY desire and go after it.
May you feel this level of creative power to place the cosmic order for it.
May you come to know you have this Londyn level of creative power and give yourself permission to place the cosmic order for your own strawberry burrito in the bathtub. Metaphorically, of course.
And may all this come to pass in a divine, genius, perfect way… under grace, over calm seas and starting right now. And so it is.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.
Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq. The Inner Critic Coach™️ Founder + CEO of SoulTour
A little while back, I shared about how I made the Million Dollar Decision to secure my only trusted babysitter for one overnight Mama’s night off, two times a month, for the entire year of 2022.
We’re only a couple of weeks into the year and this is already ranking up there in my Top 10 Decisions of All Time.
I’ve started this beautiful routine where I leave Londyn and the sitter in an unrushed, leisurely way, then I take a little journey through the village of my neighborhood, dropping in to pick up a luxurious new journal or a green ginger smoothie from a new juice bar as I make my way up to the resort that’s connected to our country club (and FYI: joining the club is probably also on my Top 10 Decisions list).
I check myself in for the night, spread out my laptops and books and papers, turn on some meditation music, sit for a bit, and then GO. Monk-mode is on.
After a few hours, I take a break, get dressed up and go downstairs for dinner. After I’m greeted with a million “Where’s Londyn!!??”s from the smiling staff, they seat me at “my table”, aka the chef’s table, aka the best table in the house.
I might just sit and eat and gaze at the setting sun and the dawning moon. Or I might have a friend join me for dinner. Or I might not be able to stop writing, so I just bring my laptop with me and click away.
Just in the first couple of these mini Monk Mode sessions, I’ve already outlined two new courses and done much of the research for my next book.
But what I really want to share with you today is what happened when I got home from the last of these little retreats.
It was a glorious Sunday afternoon by the Bay. It’s January, so it was like 70 degrees outside (21° C). The sitter brought Londyn to meet me at the club, and we swam and had brunch all together before L and I headed home to prep for the week. As we buckled Londyn into her car seat, the sitter mentioned that Londyn had complained about her ear bothering her several times the night before, and suggested that I ask her about it.
So I did.
Very nonchalantly, Londyn said: “Yeah! Last night a rat climbed into my ear and laid eggs in there. I can still hear the eggs!”
Me: 😳 “Wait. What happened?”
And she repeated herself.
Very clearly. Very precisely.
I asked her a few follow up questions to try to figure out whether it was a dream or something she’d read about in a book… or…anything other than a rat laying eggs in her ear.
And then—because you truly can know too much about psychology to be a peaceful parent— I began to search This Here Internet with queries like “Jungian dream eggs ear”, “dream analysis rat eggs ear”, “bug eggs ear dream” and my personal best: “what does it mean to dream about something laying eggs in your year”.
I think that by asking her about it, I re-activated the subject in her mind. She hadn’t mentioned it all day up to then, but once I asked… she kept bringing up the eggs in her ear.
Maybe an hour into this conversation, it occurred to me that there might actually be something. What if something’s actually in her ear?
Well that skeeved me all the way out. So I asked her if we should go see the doctor about it, and she enthusiastically agreed that we should, her little Afro nodding vigorously. I called the pediatric nurse hotline, and told the woman who answered exactly what happened.
She said, “We’re in peak Omicron right now, so I really can’t tell you to take her to the emergency room. I can get her in at 10:00 in the morning. Will that work?”
I turned to Londyn and said, “Babe, how about we see if the eggs come out tonight and go see the doctor in the morning?”
Her facial expression was my answer. She looked like…well, she looked like how you would look if you had rat’s eggs in your ear and managed to keep it together for one whole night, but then someone offered you the chance of relief, and then you found out it would be another whole night before you could actually get the relief you’d glimpsed.
And she started to panic, “No, Mommy!! We need to go to the doctor now!!!”
So I got back on the phone with the nurse and said: “Listen. We live in Oakland. I can drive up to 50 miles, but I’ll go in any direction. I need you to look for any urgent care center that’s open right now in any direction. We can go to San Francisco, Walnut Creek, Pleasanton, Richmond, Marin… wherever. Where can we be seen immediately?”
The nurse clicked and clacked away, and came back with an answer: “Well, Dublin is about 30 miles from you and they have an urgent care that’s open right now. I have no idea how many people are in line to be seen, but you can try it.”
And that’s what we did.
I fed the dog and let her out, threw a bunch of snacks and books in my backpack and packed up The Little Homegirl.
Before we got in the car, I got down so my eyes were at the same level as hers, and I said: “Okay, honey bunny… I heard you say there are rat’s eggs in your ear! So we’re gonna go to the doctor’s office. But we’re gonna have to drive a long way, and we might have to be there the rest of the evening. So before we go, please tell me if you really need to see a doctor tonight or if there’s something you watched or read that made you think of eggs in your ear. If you tell me we need to go see the doctor, we will go, but if you don’t really need to go, please tell me right now.”
She said: “We need to go now, Mom.”
And two hours later, after the very-quick drive (by Bay Area standards) and a not-terrible-actually wait (also by Bay Area standards), I told the Physician’s Assistant (PA) about our rat’s eggs in the ear issue.
I told her I’d searched for what an eggs-in-your-ear dream might mean, and she said “WHOA, people have dreamed about that?”
Me: “Um, yes. Sooooo, humans have dreamed every dream that could be dreamt. But dreams are symbolic in meaning, not literal. In our case, I think Londyn actually has something in her ear.”
PA shined the ear scope into Londyn’s “good” ear and quickly declared it good. Then she shined it into the “rat’s egg” ear. She looked a looooong time, stepped back, raised her eyebrows and said: “Mom, you might want to come look at this.”
Deep in Londyn’s ear was one, single crooked white pug dog hair, probably an inch long.
You know. Rat’s eggs.
That single hair had been stuck in there, tweaking The Great Londyno’s little eardrum, probably making a cacophony of scritches and scratches for maybe 24 hours. All afternoon, I’d noticed Londyn opening and closing her mouth which (according to Dr. Google) was probably causing the hair to make even weirder noises in her ear.
My 4 minutes of Internet mastery of the subject quickly revealed that a) hair-in-the-ear is a known issue that usually arises after a haircut, and b) there are a handful of ways to get them, but if you don’t, it’s no big deal because c) the ear canal is self-cleaning, so even with no intervention almost anything in your ear will come out on its own… eventually.
And the PA said something to the same effect.
But I couldn’t let my girl just sit there with rat’s eggs in her ears—not with a bunch of trained medical professionals standing around.
In the end, it took three different people 45 minutes to get the hair out of Londyn’s ear. They actually couldn’t get it out. After the ear-nose-throat specialist tried and failed, the PA came back, shone the light around in there a bit more and exclaimed: “Oh! It just fell out!!”
Londyn broke into an enormous smile.
She drolly said, “Mamaaaaa there weren’t rat’s eggs in my ear. It was a Miko hair!!”
By now I’m sure you’re (relieved but also) wondering why I’m telling you this story.
And I’m telling you this story because on your journey of spiritual awakening of recalibration, of self-actualization, and of alignment, sometimes —a lot of times—a Spiritual Alarm Clock will ring—you’ll encounter an illness, an injury, a crisis or seeming-catastrophe—and you will not know exactly what to do. You will not know, should you stay? Or should you go? You will not know, should you wait, or should you go see the medical doctors about it, or should you try to treat yourself?
I think the rats-eggs-in-the-ear experience is an excellent symbol for those moments of discomfort, dis-ease, disharmony, and alarm.
So here’s what you should do if you feel like you’ve got rat’s eggs in your figurative, metaphoric ear:
1. Listen to your Inner Child. Do not gaslight yourself into ignoring the symptom, a misalignment or disharmony until it’s more convenient to address it.
That time might never come, and your Inner Child will panic and grow louder in her discontent until she gets heard.
Chronic stress that leads to chronic and complex disease is just that: your Inner Child crying out to be heard, acknowledged and attended to, especially when you’ve been overruling, and overwriting, and ignoring those cries for a really long time.
2. Get symbolic. Dr. Jung said that in our lifetimes, we’ll each have five dreams that could accelerate our awakening in life-changing ways if we could catch the symbolic meaning they were trying to convey.
I’ve come to know that this is true for our sleeping dreams, but it’s equally true for our Ignored or Unfulfilled Aspirations, many of our physical symptoms, relationship breakdowns and all manner of other crises.
I call these our Spiritual Alarm Clocks because they are actually trying to do the work within us of waking us TF up from the trance-like thought habits that keep us from aligning to our True Selves out of fear, scarcity, unworthiness and trauma.
So when these things come up—a crisis, an impasse or an illness—it’s a best practice to look for the symbolic meaning.
Sometimes, it’s very one-to-one. Sometimes, it’s symbolic but it’s still direct.
Throat problems may symbolize lifelong self-expression that you’ve been holding in.
Feet problems may represent being stuck, not moving forward in life.
Bone problems may suggest your infrastructure is out of alignment.
Connective tissue issues often track back to unprocessed trauma and resulting disconnection: from self, from others, from Source.
Inflammation? Sure, cut off all the sugar and alcohol, but look for the unexpressed anger or boundary violations you’ve never addressed.
Dis-ease in your body can be dis-ease in your own skin, your own life.
Overeating? You might need more spiritual and emotional nutrition.
If you want help decoding these sorts of symptoms symbolically, I’ll list some go-to references at the end.*
But also know this: This is unconscious work. This is shadow work. And when you work with your shadows, you must never judge yourself for what you discover. You must be very patient, and let the symbolic meaning reveal itself to you in its own time. And you must never be too hasty to feel like you can check the box of having figured it all out from a single Google search, because it’s also essential that you…
3. But make sure you don’t get TOO symbolic. Don’t gaslight yourself the other way either. Don’t forget that you have a real physical body in a real physical world. Don’t be so hasty to find a spiritual, symbolic or psychosomatic root cause that you overlook ACTUAL rat’s eggs in your ACTUAL ear. Londyn is 4. Her vocabulary is very advanced. But she didn’t have the knowledge to think, “hmmm statistically speaking, something else is probably in my ear”. What she knew from reading her books is that rats are bigger than mice, and that mice make a scritchy-scratchy noise. And she knew there’s no actual animal in there so… ipso, facto… rats > eggs > ear.
Sometimes, the health breakdown is not a self-created, metaphoric crisis. Sometimes you actually need medical help. Sometimes the relationship breakdown is due to real boundary violations or a true mismatch and there’s no amount of reframing, love and light or therapy that would create true alignment. Sometimes you feel all torn up about sending your kid off to the school they hate every day because your Inner Intelligence knows your kid is actually being treated poorly at that school, or their independent spirit is being snuffed out. Sometimes you hate your job because it’s an actively toxic workplace and a terrible way to spend the precious moments of your life.
Don’t gaslight yourself into thinking everything is symbolic or even deep. Sometimes a shitty job is just a dog hair in your ear.
4. Don’t ask for too many opinions on what’s in your ear. If you feel the disharmony, let that be enough. Don’t try to calibrate how bad you’re willing to let yourself feel by asking everyone you know if you’re being too sensitive or if you should sleep on it until the next day/week/month/decade.
Don’t get it twisted: MOST humans in the Western world are uninspired, unhappy, disengaged and disconnected. Never let someone else’s low bar for joy be a justification for overruling your Inner Guidance and trying to drown out the discomfort that’s trying to give you information about what changes you need to make in your life, when and how.
By all means, ask for help, support and resources making the changes you need to make.
Ask for insight, connection and companionship as you make them.
Ask for someone who loves you to witness your experience.
But never predicate your willingness to make a change you know needs making on whether others in your life will understand or approve of those changes.
And don’t ask for permission, opinions or approval and do not make their understanding or participation in your change be a prerequisite for you to heed, honor and answer your Spiritual Alarm Clocks.
It is not your job to explain your Inner Guidance to them or anyone else.
Here’s to a rat’s-egg free rest of the (y)ear.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: A few relevant resources:
Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life has a handy-dandy chart in the back where you can look up the psychospiritual roots of many physical symptoms.
Gay Hendrick’s Big Leap has a similar chapter that decodes some of the crises and catastrophes that befall us when we hit our upper limits in life.
“She was said to be the first and the prime creator, who created the universe and all it contains, and that she governs how it functions. She was the goddess of the cosmos, fate, wisdom, water, rivers, mothers, childbirth, hunting, weaving, and war.”
Like I said, Neith was no joke.
Like a primordial sacred spider, every night, Neith was said to unravel the entire world as the sun set into darkness.
And every morning, she would sit at her loom and weave the whole world back to life.
(If Neith’s description sounds familiar, it was she from whom the Greeks found inspiration for their Greek goddess Athena, several thousand years later.)
I’m telling the story of Neith as the sacred story at the center of a new program I’m creating, called the Dream Validation Workshop. 💭✅
But as I’ve been working with the narrative of Neith, I’ve been receiving a download for you.
So, dearly beloved, we are gathered here today for a super-important public service announcement for this season of humanity and of your life. I’m here to transmit a single message and concept today and here it is: It’s time to break your identity.
If you want to have a breakthrough… If you want to engineer your watershed season… If you want to clear your mind and bring your deepest powers online… If you want to rediscover your focus and actualize your True, Sacred Self… It’s time to break your identity.
And I mean that in the most loving way.
If you normally go hard, in this season, you’re being called to cultivate soft.
If you normally have a need for speed, embrace the slow and the gradual. I have come to know that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Exaggerate slow.
If you are characteristically one to delay, do something right now. Anything. Don’t worry about getting it right or the outcome, even. Just tune in and feel how it feels to finally move, and trust that the motion itself will generate at least a nugget of joy or wisdom or clarity. Let that be enough.
If you are a known giver, open up to receive in this season. If you’re always helping, receive assistance. Which brings me to…
If you’re constantly in action, try inaction. Wait. A whole lot of us are not receiving the assistance that is trying to get to us from the spheres because we keep surrendering stuff and then taking it right back to work on it some more, trying to be the Directors of the Universe, fearful that if we don’t get what we want it’s because we didn’t do enough or go hard enough.
These are all lies of culture. Just wait. Stand down. Receive. Let assistance in. Allow things to unfold.
Trust that they are unfolding, in Divine Order and Timing, which ALWAYS benefit you. Always.
If you’re always overbooked, clear your whole calendar for a week and let it feel absurdly uncomfortable for a couple of days. Be ruthless with it. I predict something golden will drop into the space, if you create it. If you’re constantly doing, take a season and dream instead.
If you’re only ever dreaming, try doing. If you dream small, imagine what would be possible if you had access to every resource in this universe and play with that daydream for a while. If you’re always dreaming big, imagine the most beautiful hour you can think of, and then live it.
These are just some ideas, but if you find this idea of interrupting your own patterns to be super, super difficult, I want you to know this shouldn’t feel like a punishing chore.
It’s supposed to be a love tap…a gentle nudge of your own inner archetypes that interrupts the patterns that keep you holding yourself back. And by interrupting any pattern within you, you break the pool of the patterns that hold you back.
So make the change be something that feels outrageous but that you would LOVE if you gave yourself permission to make it.
If the above seem too heady or hard, take a cue from the goddesses and just change something about your identity, and it can truly be anything: trust in Divine Order to let your one intentional change be the domino that falls in this domino effect of shifting whatever else things to break about your identity.
If you don’t normally wear jewelry, bring on the bling.
If you normally dress down, dress up.
If you’ve never had color in your hair in your life go blonde. (I just did!)
If you’re normally a minimalist, be maximalist.
If your walls are all white, paint them all different colors… and if they’re colored, paint them white. (Just please… not beige… this ain’t the season for beige, Brilliant One.)
If you normally wear black and white, wear neon or animal print.
If you usually drive, walk or (gasp) take the bus.
You don’t have to do all of these things… just pick one. And if these assignments seem crazy to you, note the objection that comes to mind, because the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And the way you BLOCK YOURSELF from doing one thing may illuminate the way you block yourself from doing the other, beautiful things you want to do.
Years ago, I heard Martha Beck talk about how if you had a room in your house you hated, you could just put one thing in there that you love and watch how other things that you love gravitate to it.
This is what I want you to do with your identity—with your life—right now.
I want you to make one pattern interrupt that feels like it could be deeply delicious for you and watch all the other developments begin to snowball. At SoulTour, we don’t really do “breakthrough” the way everybody else tries to do it, by mapping out some massive action plan and efforting everything to death. We’re not doing that. We’re going to harness the power of all the higher powers and forces that really run the show around here.
That’s the assistance you activate when you break your identity.
So, maybe you need to change your name or change the route you take to work—it honestly doesn’t even matter what you change—but it is time to make a change that breaks your identity in a delicious way.
And it’s time to break your identity now.
Be like Neith.Unravel it.
Anticipate that it will be uncomfortable, so that when you feel the discomfort, you’ll know you’re doing it right.
Get the discomfort started asap, so you can get comfortable being in the uncomfortable zone… aka the zone beyond your comfort zone.
If you choose to accept this assignment, I predict that you will begin to see the glimpses of the new personal mythology—you will begin to live the creation myth of your True, Sacred Self—who wants you to weave it to Life in this season.
Remember that Neith unraveled the whole world and re-created it every day. You and your dreams can be fresh and new tomorrow, too. Don’t be afraid.
Let this be light and playful.
Let this process be the beginning of your own sacred story.
Let it be the beginning of your process of dreaming a way more delicious dream.
Head up + heart out,
P.S.: This lesson is a download I received over the last week, specifically to transmit to you in this season.
But breaking your identity is also a Spiritual Strategy I have used over and over again, over the years, on my own SoulTour from super-repressed teen Mom-turned-Type-A-lawyer to the magically delicious life of the soul I get to live now.
PPS: Want more like this? Become a SoulTour subscriber for just $11 a month.
Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq. The Inner Critic Coach™️ Founder + CEO of SoulTour
