A few weeks ago, in Cambodia, I was given a name: Ara Tara. It came through my mentor and teacher of sacred dance, who works through what she calls multidimensional perception. She has an unusual ability to receive information directly, without the long process of analysis or interpretation most of us rely on. She reads from the larger field itself, from Spirit, from the same source of consciousness that exists beyond the personality and the biography of this particular life. What came through was not meant to be another spiritual name, a ceremonial title, or a beautiful identity for me to adopt. She told me it was my true name: the name connected to what we call the star family, the deeper lineage of the soul that exists beyond this particular incarnation. Ara Tara. She did not only hear the name. She saw the being associated with it. And this was where it became strangely personal. She described someone enormous, almost giant in scale, but nothing like the solemn, untouchable spiritual figures we are accustomed to imagining. This being was laughing, active, mischievous, almost girlish. My teacher said it felt as though a lively, restless girl had somehow been placed inside the body of a giant, a very noble giant. She even saw two braids sticking out to the sides, almost like Pippi Longstocking. I loved her immediately! There was something almost comical about the contrast: enormous, but playful... powerful, but not severe... ancient, maybe, but completely alive! At the time I didn't know what to make of it. I certainly wasn't ready to build another identity around it. I already have enough identities, titles, trainings and ways of explaining myself. So I did something that has become increasingly important to me: I didn't rush to interpret it. I let the name stay with me. Ara Tara.

I wanted to see whether life itself would begin to give the name meaning. And then, a few weeks later, I sat down with Lesya, the woman who had been our guide in Cambodia. She works with her own system of names, numbers, vedic teaching, ancestral patterns, karmic tasks and what she calls a psychoenergetic matrix etc. All the stuff I love! I came mostly out of curiosity, I didn't have a specific question or issue to resolve... we just started chatting... and something rather uncomfortable happened: she began describing the person I have already become. Not the person I could potentially become one day, not some future spiritual version of me, but the woman who is already here. And what shocked me most was how little of what she described was actually new. Again and again I found myself thinking and saying: I already do this.

One of the strongest themes in her reading was the relationship between learning and teaching. According to her system, my soul number is connected with Jupiter, which she associates with knowledge, learning and transmission. She described me as someone who will probably study for the rest of my life because curiosity itself is part of how I function! That hardly surprised me. I have been collecting education, certifications, systems and practices all my life: languages, law, economics, privacy, coaching, Jung, shadow work, socionics, somatics, breathwork, psychedelic integration, Sacred Dance, herbs, sauna traditions, death and dying, ritual, consciousness, quantum physics, bio-engineering etc. you name it! I can become interested in almost anything and then disappear into it until I understand how it works! I used to feel guilty that I always "study" and other people would "shame" me or "laugh" at me because of this feature. Even though those who did that, always enjoyed my curiosity, acquired knowledge and breath of topics I could maintain in the conversation. My life is fucking awesome, because I am interested in life! 

But Lesya said the important part isn't how much information I can accumulate. It is what I do with it. I take something complicated, find its underlying structure and translate it into a form another person can understand. Different people may need completely different explanations of the same thing, and I instinctively keep changing the language until the person in front of me can receive it. At one point she described this ability in a rather unglamorous but accurate way: I can digest something very complicated and spit it back out simply, so another can understand and lift this person to my level of awareness. Then she began listing the forms this ability could take: teaching, writing books, creating systems, developing methodologies and instructions, mentoring people, creating retreats. I listened and suddenly thought: But this is already my life. I should write a book though... and finish writing a course... 

For years I have built complex privacy programs and translated laws, risks and regulatory requirements into systems that ordinary people inside a business can actually use. The Lantern came from exactly the same instinct: take the enormous complexity of perception, belief, unconscious reaction and human behavior and make the mechanism visible. I write, I teach, I create retreats, I work with women and men. I work with sauna, plants, body, breath, ritual and transition. I build structures around things that initially exist as a cloud of information, intuition, experience and observation. Even my forest property has slowly become another expression of the same tendency: take an idea that exists only in my head and give it physical form.

I am a creator. I am beginning to see how consistently this has been true throughout my life. I touch something, and it rarely remains what it was. An idea becomes a program. A piece of land becomes a place where people gather, rest, celebrate, grieve, practice, and experience something they may carry home with them. Knowledge becomes a system. A conversation becomes a community. A practice becomes something I can teach. I don't simply make things; I seem to give them enough structure, energy, and attention to begin a life of their own. And once they do, they become visible. Other people enter them, use them, respond to them, and sometimes change because of them. What begins inside my head rarely ends with me. It enters the lives of other people and changes something there. Maybe this is also why words alone have never been enough for me. I can talk for hours about consciousness, relationships, business, healing, spirituality, or what might be possible, but eventually I need to build something. I need the idea to acquire bones. Give it a name. Draw the structure. Find the land. Write the program. Make the spreadsheet. Build the website. Open the door. Invite the first person in. I have very little interest in spending years discussing a life that never crosses the threshold into reality. And I know the particular kind of aliveness that appears when another person meets me there. I remember one conversation when two of us took what was initially only an idea and, within perhaps two hours, had practically built an entire business around it. We were throwing ideas back and forth faster than we could write them down: the concept, structure, possibilities, who it could serve, how it could work, what would need to happen next. Nothing had been built yet, and still something had unmistakably come alive between us. We both felt it. That kind of creation has an electricity of its own. It is one thing to imagine something alone.... it is another to meet someone whose mind catches the same spark and immediately starts building with you.

I think that experience taught me something about myself that I did not fully understand at the time. I come alive in the process, in creation, and I recognize people differently when they are willing to create with me. I don't need another person merely to admire my ideas or tell me that they are beautiful. I am interested in the person who reaches for the other end of the beam and says: All right. Where are we putting this? Maybe that is why certain conversations have stayed with me for years. For a moment, I wasn't talking about possibility with someone. We were inside possibility together, giving it form.

This is the part I have underestimated. Creation is not only the ability to bring something into existence. It is the recognition that what I create has consequences. If I build a space, people will enter it. If I create a system, people will begin making decisions inside it. If I teach an idea well enough, somebody may use it to understand her marriage, her body, her grief, her work, or the next decision of her life. If I gather people, relationships begin that would not have existed otherwise. Creation changes the field of possibilities around other people. That makes my ability to create much larger than personal self-expression. It also makes it a responsibility. And this is where the conversation began touching something that had already been moving inside me before I met with Lesya.

The end of apprenticeship

According to Lesya's system, nine appears prominently in my structure. She described nine as the number of the teacher, mentor or guru: someone whose task is not simply to master one subject but to gather knowledge about larger patterns and eventually transmit it to others. She believes that the second half of my life is meant to move increasingly toward this kind of transmission and social manifestation. I don't know whether the universe assigns our work through numbers, and I don't need to decide that in order to recognize what happened inside me when she said it. I wasn't surprised. I felt recognized. That was enough... 

The timing was almost absurdly precise. My year-long study of the Mysteries and the Wheel of the Year is coming to an end, and for several days before this conversation I had been feeling something very clearly: a long period of apprenticeship in my life is ending. Not learning though! LOL I suspect I will learn until my last functional brain cell gives up. What is changing is my relationship with learning... I no longer want another course to carry the hidden promise that perhaps after one more training, one more initiation, one more certification or one more teacher I will finally be qualified to trust what I already know. I am beginning to understand that the next stage of my education will happen primarily through practice: through people, mistakes, bodies, my hands, the sauna, the forest, teaching, creating, trying something and discovering where I was wrong. I want to learn from what happens when the accumulated knowledge actually touches another human life. I want to create my own work instead of endlessly becoming proficient in someone else's. Near the end of our conversation Lesya said something very simple: “You already know a great deal yourself. Maybe today I just gave you a few missing pieces of the puzzle.” That sentence probably mattered more to me than any of the numbers. Because the reading wasn't simply flattering. Lesya also described the shadow side of the very qualities she was praising. My mind is fast and systematic. Give me enough information and I begin organizing it almost automatically. This is not something I need numerology to confirm... it has followed me through my professional life. I enter a situation, understand the system, see where it is broken, see what needs to happen next and start moving while everybody else is still discussing the problem. I actually told her, laughing, “I'm already there. I already know.” Her response, essentially, was: yes, and there is a problem. Not everyone moves at your speed!

She described this force through Mars: strong, decisive, active, strategic, protective. But the lesson for that kind of force, she said, is softness. I don't need less power.... I need to learn how much of that power the person standing in front of me can actually receive... ouch! This immediately connected to the work I increasingly want to do with people, because I can sometimes see someone's pattern very quickly, through the words they are using. I hear the contradiction. I notice where the story doesn't match the facts. I can often hear the lie a person is telling themselves before they recognize it as a lie. Lesya told me not to silence this ability, but she also warned me that accurate criticism can cut very deeply. And I suddenly understood that seeing something does not automatically give me permission to expose it... Knowing where someone might need to go does not mean I should drag them there. Sometimes the mature use of perception is timing.

She said something else in language much less polite than anything I would put into a training manual: sometimes you need to let a person fuck it up themselves. Let them take the wrong step... Let them discover through pain... Stop kicking them forward simply because you already know where the road leads. There is a shadow side to being capable. You start doing things for people because you can! Because you see! Because you CARE about them! You solve, organize, protect, teach, rescue and carry, until eventually competence becomes interference. Her advice was to stop responding automatically every time somebody arrives with an emergency and first ask: Is this actually mine? Was I asked? Can I help? Should I help? Or am I about to deprive another adult of an experience they need to have because watching them struggle makes me uncomfortable?

This led directly into what Lesya calls my karmic lesson: power, authority and control. I laughed when she said it because, of course. But I have recently begun understanding control in a much subtler way than telling people what to do. There is another form of control I know intimately: trying to control how another person perceives me. Correcting someone's version of me, defending my intentions, explaining what really happened, trying to make someone recognize my contribution, protecting my reputation, forcing recognition. I told Lesya that I had begun noticing a strange mechanism in my own life: the harder I fight for something from that place, the more I seem to destroy the very thing I am trying to protect. Suddenly her karmic language became psychologically useful to me. Maybe power isn't learning how to make reality obey me. Maybe power is being able to see reality clearly without needing to control everybody else's version of it? 

Cambodia had already begun teaching me this before I had language for it. On our way through the jungle I was put on the back of a motorcycle with a Cambodian man I had never met. No helmet, terrible road, rocks, mud, my first motorcycle ride. I was terrified. For the first few minutes my entire body was contracted. I was practically climbing onto the driver, watching everything he did and internally criticizing him. Why are you doing that? Why are you taking this line? Why are you driving me like this? Eventually my body couldn't maintain the tension anymore. I moved backward and relaxed. We hit another bump and I realized it was easier. Another bump. Still fine. And then, rather quickly, it became fun. The road hadn't changed and the driver hadn't changed. My relationship to not being in control had changed. Lesya had a much more metaphysical explanation for this. According to her reading, I have two sevens in my matrix (not to mention that I always loved this number!), which she interprets as two protectors, my two wings behind me: one connected to my ancestral line and another to the Universe or Creator (higher protection). She described it almost as a protective dome around me, and said something that made me laugh: even if one of them sneezes and closes their eyes for a second, the other one is still watching. In her words, the protection around me is almost ridiculously strong, and somehow extends to the people who enter my field as well. I don't know how literally I understand any of this, but the idea touched something I had suspected about my own life for a long time. One of the things I am here to learn is trust: not blind faith that nothing bad can happen to me, but a deeper willingness to stop meeting life as though I must personally control every variable in order to be safe. Cambodia gave me very little choice but to practice that. Again and again, I found myself in situations where I didn't know what was happening, couldn't control what came next, and had to let someone else drive, guide, pour the water, choose the road, or simply let the experience unfold. The motorcycle taught it to me physically: the tighter I held on, the harder the ride became... when I finally relaxed, nothing outside me had changed, yet everything about the experience had. Control and safety are not the same thing. Sometimes control is simply the tension we add to a life that is already carrying us somewhere.

There was another part of Lesya's reading that made the name Ara Tara feel even more interesting to me. She spoke about inner ethical structure as something already deeply embedded in the way I teach and move through the world. In her system, this is connected with Jupiter: knowledge is not enough, knowledge has to be carried through a sense of what is right, what is responsible, what serves and what harms. She said that I have an unusual ability to connect the rules of the material world with what is actually happening inside a human being, and to explain something in a way that allows a person to recognize where they are deceiving themselves or others. This is also why hypocrisy, manipulation and self-deception are so difficult for me to ignore... I see the discrepancy very quickly. My work now is learning that seeing it clearly does not always mean I have to expose it immediately...

And suddenly I remembered one of the funniest moments in Cambodia. When the name Ara Tara first came through my teacher, Diana, I didn't understand its meaning. Later another women explained it to me as something like the Noble Woman, an image carrying the quality of a goddess, even the Mother of God... a mother of creation.... I was genuinely stunned... Only a few days earlier I had discovered a completely different part of myself in Cambodia and jokingly named her shalaven: my shameless, flirtatious, mischievous woman who loves to play, laugh, enjoy male attention, playfully manipulative and doesn't need every spark between a man and a woman to become a destiny. When I learned about my true meaning, I turned around and Diana was walking behind me with her husband. I looked at her with the astonishment of someone who had just discovered a major fact about herself and said: “Diana! It turns out I'm not a shalaven at all!”  She smiled at me: “No, darling. You're not.” I thought about it for a second. “Well... shalaven is me too.”  “Yes,” she said. “That's you too.” And something in me suddenly softened. “God, she's actually wonderful. And I was judging her!” Diana only smiled and gave me a hug. 

I think I understand that exchange differently now. Ara Tara did not arrive to replace my shalaven. The Noble Woman did not appear to clean me up, make me respectable, spiritual, restrained or appropriately sacred. She was large enough to contain her, and every other part of me or any other part of another... that is why I am a giant... Maybe that is what nobility actually means to me now. It is not purity achieved by cutting away the inconvenient parts of yourself. It is having a strong enough inner axis that you no longer need to exile them. I am a cross... that connects Spiritual with Material and spreads around into the horizon... I can have a deeply rooted moral structure and still flirt. I can be a teacher and be ridiculous teaching. I can hold another woman through grief and later laugh until my stomach hurts. I can work with death and love beautiful clothes. I can pray and swear. I can be sexually alive without making sexuality the measure of my worth. I can be powerful without becoming solemn. My integrity does not depend on becoming less alive.

That is what I hadn't understood about the scale of Ara Tara. She is not enormous because she is above ordinary human contradictions. She is enormous because there is room inside her for them all. The teacher, the woman, the mother, the lawyer, the healer, the creator, the flirt, the serious one, the shameless one, the one who serves and the one who wants pleasure. None of them has to murder the others in order for one of them to be called “true.”

And maybe my true name is beginning to teach me something I didn't expect: wholeness is not becoming one perfect version of yourself. It is becoming large enough that none of your living parts has to be expelled in order for you to respect yourself.

The ancestral line

Another large part of Lesya's reading concerned my family line, and this is where her system touched experiences I have carried for years. I have always felt a strong relationship with my ancestors. Sometimes I have dreams or impressions about relatives I barely knew or never knew at all. Sometimes I ask my mother afterward and discover details I couldn't consciously remember or knew. My family can also be critical, combative and fractured. People stop speaking. Conflicts continue for years. People are removed from the family story because somebody decided they were shameful, difficult or inconvenient. And yet my mother has described me as something like a keeper of the family. Within Lesya's system, my nine makes me a carrier or collector of ancestral knowledge, someone whose task includes remembering, reconnecting and returning excluded people to the family story. Again, I don't know what can be objectively proven about ancestral assignments, but I recognize the behavior immediately. I do this. When somebody has been erased, something in me wants their name back in the story. Who was he or she? What happened to them? Why don't we talk about them? I don't like amputated family trees. I want the whole tree... whatever they were - I am thankful for that ring in our tree... it keep growing... and while it is growing, I want to recognize every one of them for their contribution into me and my girls... 

The ancestral reading contained something less romantic too: stop parenting my parents. She described what happens when a child climbs above the parents in the family hierarchy and begins correcting, saving, educating or emotionally managing them. Love can say: “I will help you.” Control says: “I cannot tolerate allowing you to live the consequences of being you.” I suspect this distinction is going to matter enormously in whatever work I do next.

Lesya also identified what she calls my primary psychological obstacle as fear of loneliness. Duh! She made a distinction I liked: being alone and being lonely are entirely different states. In her reading, when fear of loneliness takes over, it can turn into rescuing, sacrifice, emotional hunger and attempts to hold people close... its mature expression is independence, self-sufficiency and the ability to go into one's own cave, become quiet and return to oneself. In fact her system also confirmed that I needed my own cave... to restore my own balance... That describes a contradiction people around me sometimes don't understand. I can be enormous socially: loud, funny, active, dancing, organizing, talking, hosting, creating. And then suddenly I disappear. People ask whether something is wrong. Nothing is wrong. I need silence. Lesya laughed and suggested I simply tell people, “I'm rebooting. Disc fragmentation is in process...” I like that... 

An elephant inside a hamster

At some point she gave me perhaps the best image of the entire reading. She said my energy is like an elephant stuffed inside the body of a hamster. Eventually the elephant needs to get out: dance, jump into water, roar, speak, create, take up space, be visible, love, want, live loudly and enjoy passionate sex.

I immediately thought of Ara Tara, because when my teacher first described the image associated with that name, she didn't see some solemn white-and-gold spiritual woman sitting elegantly on a lotus. She saw something enormous, almost giant, but playful, laughing and super active. A great being with the spirit of an irrepressible girl inside her and two ridiculous Pippi Longstocking-like braids. I loved her immediately. Perhaps one of the mistakes I have made with spirituality is assuming that greater consciousness should make us more solemn. Maybe my own form of maturity is not becoming smaller, quieter and more appropriately “spiritual.” Maybe it is becoming large enough to contain everything: the teacher and the lawyer, the herbalist and the woman who works with death, the woman dancing barefoot and the privacy officer building governance systems, the mother, the caregiver, the woman who loves beautiful things, the woman who swears like a saylor, the one who needs silence and the one who wants to be seen, the one who no longer needs everyone to see her correctly, the serious one and the girl with the braids and pimple.

Cambodia, meanwhile, has apparently refused to become a completed trip. I keep dreaming about it. Recently I had a strange dream in which I was suddenly back in Cambodia. There was no journey, airport or flight. One moment I was here, and then somehow I was there, almost as if I had been teleported. What disturbed me in the dream wasn't how I got there. I was worried that my people would be looking for me. I kept trying to find some way to contact them. I needed to tell them: I'm okay. I'm here. Don't worry. I woke up remembering that feeling very clearly. It wasn't simply I am in Cambodia. It was: I have people somewhere who need to know where I am. My body has been going through its own strange processes since the trip, and my dreams have become unusually vivid. Then last night I dreamed that I was leading group therapy for women. That caught my attention because I don't lead women's group therapy, certainly not in the form I saw in the dream. I have facilitated women, hosted circles, created retreats, taught, held practices, worked individually and created spaces where women go through very deep things. But in the dream the scale was different. I was leading the group. I don't know whether the dream predicts anything, and I don't need it to. What interests me is that my own unconscious seems to be imagining me larger than I have consciously permitted myself to imagine.

And maybe this is where Ara Tara begins to make sense to me. I am not interested in turning the name into another spiritual title. I don't need another title...  I have plenty. What interests me is whether the name can become a question: How much of myself am I actually willing to inhabit?

Lesya told me that my formula for success, in her system, consists of four things: desire, intelligence, administration and expansion. Want more! Learn what you don't know! Turn it into a system! Then make the thing real! I laughed because this may be the least mystical reading I have ever received. It is almost exactly how I have built everything in my life. I become interested, learn obsessively, understand the structure, build a system, and then somehow there is a company program, a community, a retreat, a house in the forest, a course, a practice, a website, an event. She told me I have the ability to take an idea from the mental world and materialize it. I don't need numerology to know that one! There is evidence.

The harvest

That is why this conversation happened now. My year of Mysteries and the Wheel of the Year is almost finished... strangely enough I have no course lined up! :-) I keep returning to the same word: harvest. I am looking at what actually grew. What became mine? What remains someone else's teaching? What entered my body? What can my hands do now? What can I teach without opening a notebook? What have I lived enough to transmit? What can I leave behind? The tree is alive... the tree keep growing... 

I used to think becoming a Master meant acquiring enough knowledge so you feel confident. nope! Now I suspect it has much more to do with no longer needing knowledge to protect you from practice, because practice is where your beautiful systems encounter an actual human being, and an actual human being does not behave according to your system. She resists. He lies. She isn't ready. He takes the wrong road. She needs three years for something you saw in three minutes. You misread someone. You push too hard. You get something wrong. You apologize. You adjust. You get up... You learn. Slowly, knowledge stops belonging to your teachers and becomes yours.

Maybe this is the threshold I am standing at now. I am not finished learning. I am finished waiting for learning to make me ready... I already have knowledge, a voice, hands, experience and a body of work. I already know how to build. I know how to gather people. I know how to take something complicated and find its structure. I know how to create a space and stay when something difficult begins to happen inside it. I know how to turn ideas into things that exist in the physical world. There is plenty I still don't know, and I hope that remains true for the rest of my life.  

But the question has changed. I don't ask anymore  what else do I need to learn before I am ready? It is: what am I going to do with everything I already know? And maybe this is the beginning of understanding Ara Tara: not becoming someone larger than I am, but finally stopping the habit of making myself smaller than I already am. That was a bad habit... not useful for sure!