Earning Back Your Own Trust

There's Always Something Else Underneath

Happy weekend, dear ones.

In case you missed it, there’s a most, most excellent interview with the wonderful Xenia Viray of Myths of Creation out on the podcast. This conversation was alchemical and felt once-in-a-lifetime. It covered such a wide range of topics while also staying within the realms of why we’re all feeling unmoored, why we need to shapeshift, and ways to stay open while doing so. Listen in here.

Xenia is also a contributor to the 2026 edition of Many Moons, and if you don’t want to rush out and get it just based on our conversation, then I’m afraid you’re AI, not a human with a heart who cares about ecology, intuition, creativity, and knows they need to shapeshift. Until November 30th, we’re having a big sale, so the time to get your copy is now.

As I shared in a previous Venus 3 x 3, all this year, the New and Full Moons have felt especially potent and intense. Since this summer, most of them have been helping me to move on from aspects of the past that have been clinging to me like stubborn burrs. I also got my mind blown when I learned that shame is dopamine, and the brain doesn’t tell the difference between “good” and “bad” dopamine. Shame can turn into discernment, humility, vulnerability, integrity, eroticism, and connection. And yes, I do believe, when alchemized properly, shame can turn into art.

This Scorpio New Moon time has been a major wake-up call. It begs for clarity, capacity, and courage.

The courage to change, the courage to experiment, the courage to slow down, the courage to sit deeply, the courage to let go, and the courage to face so many things I’ve been avoiding.

For the past year, I’ve been betwixt and between the extreme poles of burning it all down or staying the course. These are nervous system responses born out of fear—the urge to light the match and flee is flight. The unconscious drive to repeat is functional freeze.

These responses, designed to keep us all safe, really keep us stagnant (freeze)
or self-sabotaging (flight). Truly, I don’t want to do either. There’s a third way available: one that entails growing my aliveness, my connection to expression, to expand my capacity, and move forward with curiosity and desire, steadiness and experimentation.

This is the Secret Third Thing I channeled at the start of the year, that showed up over and over, both in my personal life, and in our Intuition course.
This mystery we know we must step into if we want to experience more flow. The fear and contraction we must surrender to, if we want to experience the relief and radiance of expansion.

We can’t see it, but we can feel it, up ahead, waiting for us patiently on the other side of the hedge. It’s that glimmering instinct inside of us that can’t be languaged, that can’t be caught, pinned down, or forced. It comes to meet us when we are unguarded, open, and more filled with curiosity than doubt.

It doesn’t want my assumptions about it, a simple resolution, a “happily ever after,” that I think would fix everything, offer the false comfort of safety, make me feel like me again (whatever that means), and allow me to exhale completely. It does not rely on immature paradigms such as being saved or certain conditions, like getting the answer right on a test. This next shimmering chapter of aliveness will not arrive in a known or certain way. It is a radical cultivation that requires surrender.

The art of the shapeshift relies on a fundamental reorganization of relations. A fundamental retelling of stories, somatic shapes, new levels of trust, and surrender. Previously, I had confused “surrender” with more grief. And no offense to grief, but at this point, I’d prefer to experience just about any other emotion this year! Like a sailor furiously trying to pour out the flood of the ocean in a sinking vessel with only a teacup, I kept returning to the scenes of crimes I never asked to be part of, trying to make sense of nonsensical stories that vampires threw onto me like their unwanted blood, circumstances awash with injustice, impossible to resolve. My brain was trying to make meaning of rooms that had been vacant for years.

Grace entered, compassionately slipped her arm around my waist. I just don’t want to drown anymore if I don’t have to, and that was what all the grief was beginning to feel like. Grace threw me a life vest called surrender, and suddenly, floating became an option.

You were supposed to grieve so that it might widen your heart even more, Grace whispered. You weren’t supposed to lose yourself in the vast ocean of it, and with it, your self-respect.

When we lose self-respect for ourselves, we lose agency, which is a prerequisite for surrender. I wonder if everyone who feels helpless or victimized right now needs to locate their self-respect. I wonder if some of those souls who feel so lost right now went too far into the underbelly of grief, which is nihilism. Nihilism is a proper response to a history in which every time you felt like you got somewhere, or experienced joy, relaxation, or hope, it was snatched from you unceremoniously.

When learning surrender, it’s best to start with the hardest, most painful, shame-inducing truths. Let the Universe know you’re overwhelmed and over it. Let the Universe know you’ll do everything in your power to cultivate joy, while understanding there are no guarantees. Thank you for giving me what I need, while protecting me from what I think I want.

Surrender is a proactive process. Surrender happens when you truly know you have done everything you could do, and then you let the Universe do the rest. You let the motion and energy you have put out come back to you in a different way. Trying to push push push push push is control. Avoidance prolongs suffering. Surrender puts your hands back on the wheel, while trusting the currents of the river you’ve chosen to push off into.

I don’t want to be extraordinary anymore. I just don’t want to be exhausted.

At this New Moon, something inside me snapped. Some shift of consciousness and energy took over inside and said: Wake UP. Stop dragging all these body bags of the past around with you. Toss them over the cliff. Throw them into the fire. Stop letting ghosts haunt you. Let go of the stories you’ve made them mean about yourself, reality itself, and the future. They aren’t you; they were what happened to you. Your shame is not an indictment of your worth. It’s a sign of how hard you’ve had to work to exist. You’ve been wrestling with illusions and projections that aren’t yours to mediate. Instead of shadowboxing, take what is truly yours and make it real. In reality, every single time you faced an unimaginable challenge, you figured it out. You weren’t always graceful, you still have a ton of room to grow, but...wisdom is application. That is what Earth School is for. Focus. Create what you are. Experience what you are. Earn back your own trust.

Trust is born from repetition. It is built day after day.
You put one foot in front of the other, all while having your own back, no matter what. (As much as you can, learning to stay securely attached to your heart.)
You do the thing you say you are going to do, you do the thing you want to do, you do the thing you don’t want to do, but know you have to do, and through that, you build evidence.

You do all you can, you stay with yourself, and then you surrender.

With enough space, enough time, enough rest, enough of doing all the things you know you have to do and actually doing them…the glimmer emerges again. It’s barely perceptible at first, but the more you open, the more you allow, the more you consider the laws of nature to be irrefutable, the more the sparkling shimmers of inspiration and eros trust you enough to curl up beside you, and eventually, they trust you enough to flow through you.

Oh! And those stubborn burrs from the past?
Burrs become seeds and fruits, once planted.
Put inside the earth to alchemize, they split open into tender growth.