Your Service Will Not Require Your Sacrifice

The medicine of passion, service, and pleasure as purpose

I’ve been working deeply with passionflower as one of my allies in this season of life and have been deeply changed and shaped by the teachings it has brought forth lately and what it has been calling me to see through the lens of my fiery heart.

I was called to build a deeper relationship to this plant sometime during the pandemic when I was living in Mendocino. At the time, I was experiencing insomnia and anxiety that was rooted from me being disconnected from the flame of my heart. I was unhappy in my marriage, living in a place that didn’t light me up, choosing to do things because I felt I had to to be of service, and was completely taken out of my passions in work and life. I became numb to the deep heart’s stirring and the mind’s conditioning ruled my experience of living. I felt heavy and completely disconnected from my soul’s purpose during this season.

This is around the time that Lilith began to speak through me, teaching me to call upon the dark goddess and reconnect to the flame of desire within that I burned out by trying to please others in my life, which became the foundation of the book I’ve been writing for 2 years now, and the anchor for how I am called to best serve the path of liberation for the people I work with.

In many ways my deepening with passionflower 3 years ago sparked this journey of descent, moving through the death of everything that dimmed my heart’s passion. Death to people, thoughts, beliefs, ways of operating not true to my energetic design, projects, illusions, and anything extinguishing my most vibrant light.

It’s been a journey of self-mastery and energetic refinement, letting the call of desire and passion free me.

So when passionflower called me back in, I knew there was a big, liberating metamorphosis awaiting, and perhaps a completion of a story I have been reweaving for the last few years.

My first night working with passionflower I swam in the stars with the dragons who had been guiding me for the last couple of months. The visceral liberation I felt made me feel like I was flying and could do anything! Oh how I longed to reconnect to this feeling for years.

My second night with passionflower I deepened into the power of my choice and stepped back into the center of my own web.

My third night with passionflower I greeted my soulmate in the dreamtime and got a glimpse of the kind of passion and spark of feeling in my heart center that was waiting for me on the other side of this threshold. New feelings started to come through me even while waking, as passion guided me moment by moment, weaving its way through the many layers of this life.

Everyday I have been reminded of the kind of passion that is available in this miraculous existence. There is just SO much more than we can even perceive or feel all at once. And I am reminded that passion must be at the center of all that we do. I am reminded that passion is the fuel that gifts us great purpose and pleasure as we sing our medicine songs into the world.

[my dear cosmic sister Xenia taken on film in the desert last spring. She is someone that carries Passionflower soul medicine to me. I also tattooed passionflower on her in 2018]

Passionflower spirit is actually a plant that is deeply woven into the medicine of Yeshua. The Passionflower and “the passion of Christ” are woven into the same medicine. It was actually said that when Yeshua died upon the cross that passion vines grew all around him, but only the woman (the Marys) could see this because they were attuned to seeing through the heart, not the mind like many others in our world.

Understanding the mystical teachings of Yeshua outside the projections placed upon him as a figure require an understanding of subtlety and the ancient mystery ways that have been erased from the legacy of light he incarnated to seed. We’ve been told the story as a culture for generations that Yeshua sacrificed himself on the cross for our sins, but that is just not the truth. The sacrifice of Christ is to sacrifice the mind for the heart. Not the body for soul.

He was persecuted for this path of carrying the heart’s flame forward, and his life may have been his sacrifice in the reality that he was killed for this, but that was not at the center of his service and teachings. Passion was. He knew that Christ Consciousness was not an intellectual ascension, but a heart awareness, a deepening into the fire of passion and purpose as service to the whole human family. Christ means “anointed one” which is to come into self-realization through the the initiation of the mystery, to understand our personal suffering and be resurrected into the fullest passion and joy available to us. Which is quite infinite, I am learning!

But there is a big story imprinted in our cultural ways that say that service is sacrifice. Perhaps it started with Yeshua, or perhaps it goes back even further.

I had a past life memory that carried this thread a couple of years ago. Long ago I was a young shaman in training in a lineage that used peacock animal sacrifice in their medicine work. As I was training to hold these ceremonies to step onto my own path of service, I felt deep within me that it was not right. But it was what I taught and what I knew. As I stepped onto my path of shaman and ceremonialist for the village, each time I sacrificed this majestic bird, I felt a part of my soul’s fire die out.

What I know about past life memories as someone who has remembered many throughout my journey and remembers lives when I work with my clients, is that these memories surface when we are repeating a karmic cycle and need to learn from the web that we wove then, to reweave something different. When this memory came back to my conscious awareness in this present lifetime, I realized there was deep shame and guilt I was carrying from the past that made it hard to feel like I could serve without some form of sacrifice to my soul and truth, that I needed to sacrifice myself in the same way I sacrificed the peacock in that timeline, in order to balance out the karma.

What I learned through this memory is that there is no medicine if there is sacrifice of soul. There is no deep service if there is the killing of your essence.

The peacock and the passionflower are closely related in their wild unique beauty and core essence energy, and I synchronistically came upon a peacock in the MIDDLE of the road yesterday on my way back from visiting a friend, which reminded me of this past life and my most authentic medicine work.

The peacock reflects to us our most authentic divine essence and magic. There is a unique magic to its expression and the way it chooses to walk through and take up space in the world. It isn’t like the other birds, and the peacock knows that it can’t even try to camouflage itself to fit in with the crowd. And that is ok. This is how it is designed! You wouldn’t force an owl to be a dolphin or a violet to be an elm. We all have to honor our sovereignty, our authentic expression, and our unique songs.

I carry through this connection to the peacock in this life and continue to work with its spirit in a more honorable way in my medicine work as I reweave these stories of essence sacrifice into the full liberation of your magic, artistry, beauty, and passion through my ceremonies and expression.

In many ways our medicine path will require sacrifice. My path has called me to sacrifice my marriage, beliefs, friendships, businesses, ideas, commitments, projections carried, and more all for my soul’s deepest callings and purpose for being here on the planet at this time.

But this is very different from sacrificing purpose and pleasure to work the soul-crushing 9-5 you feel you have to work. Or sacrificing love for the illusion of safety in the choices you make. Or sacrificing your dreams to help others live out theirs.

So much of my work comes back to divine desire and passion liberation. If I am not in integrity with my passions, I cannot be of service or align with how I can best show up in the world. And if you are not in alignment with your passion, you are not living your destiny. Simply put, if passion is not where you are getting resourced, then you may be seeking resourcing outside yourself and not able to create your life for yourself.

This is how we get caught in webs not meant for us. This is ultimately why we are a depressed and sick society. Passion has been covered with floral scented perfumes and dopamine boosting screens. Passion has been buried beneath the expectations others place upon on that we try to meet at our own expense. Passion has been put out by the weight of grief, sadness, and fear we are conditioned to carry, and passed around like a plague as it lives unprocessed in the cultural web.

And this is what I continue to share with all my mentees and clients, and what I am most devoted to in my life. Where is your desire? Where is your passion taking you? What is snuffing out your flame? How can you keep that thing LIT?!

This is the true medicine of ascension.

When we traverse the realms of death in any way, it is our own light that pulls us out. And our light is our passion flame. It is whatever sparks us from the heart. THAT is the medicine.

Wherever you are on your journey of descent to ascent, untangling your webs to reweave your destiny from soul, don’t forget your passions. Don’t forget that your sovereignty requires this. Don’t forget that your greatest service to the world is to light others from the flame burning in your own heart. Make that your priority and your halo will be bright.

Blessed New Moon xo

In gratitude,

Ash