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! 

Dear Brilliant One, 

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

@taranichollekirke on FB | TW | IG | LI